The Worst Thing

by Aaron Elkins

  Unfrightening, relatively impersonal stuff, all of it. Nothing to get me unstrung. But this morning we were due to get into the other part of the material, the tough part: what happens after a successful abduction—negotiations, ransom, and, worst of all, the ordeal of being a hostage if you have the wretched luck to be taken despite all your precautions. That was the part that had me worried. Sure, I’d been able to make myself write about that aspect of it and to read about the experiences of others, but, except for Lori, Dr. Benson (that long-ago psychiatrist), and now Zeta, I had never, not once in all these years, talked to anyone about the devastating personal horror and emotional dislocation of captivity.

  This morning I’d gotten to the lounge early and staked out an isolated nook in which to review my notes and fret about how well I was going to be able to cope with the upcoming subject matter, while the attendees gathered at the buffet table in the meeting area to sip coffee, munch pastries, and gossip.

  There were sixteen people in attendance, all senior executives: ten corporate types from the Grindavik plant, four headquartered in Reykjavik, and the two regional directors. By now I knew them all by name: Ingimar, Alvar, Lilja, Lara, Tryggvi, Ragnar, and so on. What their last names were, I didn’t have a clue. In Iceland, nobody bothers with surnames. If you bump into Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir on your way to work one morning (not all that unlikely in Reykjavik), you don’t say “Good morning, Prime Minister Sigurðardóttir”; you say “Good morning, Jóhanna.”

  It’s not a question of disrespect or informality; it’s a matter of practicality. The thing is, for ninety percent of the population, your surname isn’t really a family name. All it reveals about you is your father’s name—his first name. It works like this: If your father’s first name is Gunnar, then your last name is Gunnarsson. That’s if you’re a boy. If you’re a girl, than your last name is Gunnarssdóttir. This is, of course, something like the way most European naming systems worked in ancient times. Your father was named John? Then your name’s Johnson. Robert? Robertson. Jack? Jackson. But eventually these turned into family names and stuck, generation after generation.

  Except in Iceland, where they last just the one generation. And when you add to this the fact that women keep their own names when they marry, the result is that in a conventional family of four—mom, dad, son, daughter—nobody has the same last name. Not only that, but all four surnames disappear in the next generation. You don’t have the same name as your grandparents or grandchildren either. As a consequence, even the telephone book here is alphabetized by first name, not last; otherwise, nobody would be able to—

  “Bryan, it’s after nine, shouldn’t we be getting under way? Everybody’s waiting for you.”

  I started. My mind had wandered quite a ways away from my notes. “Right you are, Ingimar, be right there.”

  Ingimar was GlobalSeas’ vice president and director of operations. Older by ten years than anyone else in the group, and older than Baldursson as well, he was second in command at GlobalSeas. I’d gotten the impression from him, and from the way the others responded to him, that he’d been promoted once or twice too often, having reached his level of incompetence years ago. Whatever he’d been before, he was serving out his time now and doing it strictly by the book.

  I stood up to follow him, but lagged behind a little, fingering the vial in my pocket. I’d resolved not to swallow a precautionary pretraining Xanax (so far, I’d stuck to my resolve of one daily tablet, taken at bedtime, no more), but now that the moment was here I was wavering. Already, I could feel my breaths become shallower and more rapid.

  To hell with it. I pulled the cap off the vial and tossed a little orange pill into my mouth, doing it quickly before I could change my mind. Almost immediately, my breathing slowed down. I was kidding myself, of course. That is, I knew perfectly well that the drug couldn’t possibly get into my system that quickly, so at this point it was no more than a mental crutch, a placebo. The mere act of taking the thing was what was propping me up. But after all, an imaginary crutch for an imaginary problem, why not?

  I repocketed the vial and stood there for a while longer, letting the strength and calmness, real or perceived, flow back into me. Maybe I’d take one tomorrow morning too, the last day of the program, in addition to the one I’d been popping at night to ensure that I slept through. The stuff wasn’t making me dopey or slow, as far as I could tell. It just kept me levelheaded and calm, so that the terrors and heebie-jeebies couldn’t get their claws into me. It made me better at the training, more able to deal honestly and helpfully with the subject matter. It wasn’t as if I really needed them, you understand, or couldn’t stop myself from taking them if I’d wanted to; but clearly it’d be better to head off the anxiety that had been building all morning before it got a foothold. Anyway, it would only be for one more day.

  No big deal.

  Chapter 11

  The plan was simple and straightforward, but it depended on precise timing and quick action. The full massed army of the VBJ—all three of them—would be waiting in their vehicle, a dusty gray Ford Econoline passenger van with tinted windows. It would be parked and ready in the lot beside Grindavik’s Saltfish Museum (the world’s one and only), across a narrow alley from the sliding gate that provided the sole access to the GlobalSeas loading yard. Gullveig would be at the wheel. Behind her, in the body of the van, would be Magnus and Stig. Three minutes after the electric-powered gate rolled open for the Saegreifinn refrigerator truck, Gullveig would start the van’s engine. As soon as the pallet of fish had been loaded and the truck’s door pulled closed, Stig would slide the van’s door open but remain inside with the others.

  When the red metal door to Baldursson’s office on the upper floor of the metal-sided building next to the loading dock opened and he started down the stairway, all three would pull on black ski masks and Gullveig would move the gearshift to Drive, but keep her foot on the brake pedal. Then, the instant Baldursson reached for the truck driver’s manifest, she would stomp on the accelerator, and the truck would hurtle across the alley and through GlobalSeas’ open gate. As it skidded to a stop at the loading dock, Stig and Magnus would leap out, screaming and rapid-firing their blank-loaded semiautomatics, thereby shocking and intimidating the hell out of the truck driver, the forklift operator, and Baldursson. Gullveig would quickly get the truck spun around so it faced the open gate, Baldursson would be muscled into the van by Stig and Magnus, and they would be on their way. They would be through the gate in three to four seconds (at Paris’s insistence, they had rehearsed the operation a dozen times in an empty lot with markers laid out to scale), so even if someone pressed the button to roll the gate shut, it wouldn’t come close to catching them.

  They would speed north up Hafnagarta, then swing left at the corner onto Ránargata, as if they were heading toward the Reykjavik highway, but after two blocks they would turn right into the unmarked alley that led to a nameless, little-used dirt road that meandered inland through the lava fields toward Kleifarvatn, an unvisited, slowly disappearing lake in the middle of nowhere. Four miles down this track, out of sight behind one of the many rocky outcroppings alongside it, the transfer vehicle would be waiting, a 1988 Cadillac hearse with blackcurtained windows and a blind rear quarter, into which they would pile. They would leave the Ford in its place and head back in the opposite direction toward their hideout, a rented three-room apartment on the ground floor of a newly constructed, half-occupied complex of four six-story apartment buildings in Kópavogur, a nondescript residential municipality along the NI, on the sprawling southern outskirts of Reykjavik. There Baldursson would be kept while ransom negotiations proceeded. Paris had assured them that it would take one week at the most.

  That was the plan. But in kidnappings, even more than in life in general, plans have a way of not exactly proceeding according to plan.

  THE problem was that Baldur Baldursson wasn’t cooperating. In the first place, he wasn’t where he was suppo
sed to be, upstairs in his office next door; he was in the warehouse itself, where the back of the building had been outfitted with giant experimental marine tanks swirling with char and halibut at all stages of maturation from newly hatched fry to adult.

  Second, he was not alone.

  And third—unknown to the VBJ, to Camano, and to Baldursson’s own security people—he was armed.

  Chapter 12

  “I’ll tell you what really terrifies me about the possibility of being abducted,” said Lilja, one of the regional directors, a dignified older woman who wore her graying hair in an old-fashioned bun and her glasses on a lanyard around her neck. “Not so much the possibility of physical abuse—of torture—but the psychological aspect. The idea of being cooped up, all alone, for day after day, maybe in the dark, maybe chained up, in some roach-infested dungeon . . . And what about the humiliation—I mean, how do you even handle—” The next part was difficult for her to say, but she shifted her gaze to the window, and got the words out through set lips. “—how do you handle, well, for example, going to the bathroom in a bucket or something if you know they’re watching you? I just . . . I mean, I can’t imagine—”

  Oh, great, just what I needed. I inhaled deeply, grasping the lectern with both hands. This was getting too close. “It’s a good question,” I said, speaking slowly and evenly. Even with the tranquilizer in my system, I could feel the familiar stirrings of that skittish, sickish feeling in my chest. The key here was to treat the matter abstractly, not personally; to answer it with what I knew from my research, from the studies I’d read, from the experiences of others, and not with what I knew from my own childhood. Don’t think about menacing figures in faceless black hoods with holes for eyes; don’t think about a befouled plastic bucket in the corner, or cowering under a plank bed while . . .

  “If it should happen to you,” I said, “what you have to understand and accept is that you are going to undergo one of the most devastating experiences that a human being can have. There’s no getting around it. You pass in an instant from being in command of your activities, with friends and family and a daily routine, to being utterly isolated, completely unprotected, and in threatening, unfamiliar surroundings. Your dignity, your ability to order your own life, what you like or don’t like—they’re all things of the past. But you can deal with it, believe me.”

  The trainees, not all that attentive in the earlier part of the program, were listening so intently now that they didn’t seem to be breathing.

  I realized that I wasn’t either, and I made myself expel the air I’d been holding in, take in a fresh breath, and relax—try to relax—the tightening muscles at the base of my neck. “And the first few days are going to be the hardest of all, and the first few hours, once you get over the numbness and disbelief, are going to be the hardest of those. That’s just the way it is, and it’s better if you know it ahead of time, because even then, in those terrible hours, what you don’t want to do is sit around pitying yourself, analyzing and reanalyzing what happened, asking yourself again and again, ‘Why me, what could I have done differently?’ You have to fight back, and there are plenty of ways to do it. Memorize your surroundings, observe everything you can so you can help the police afterward. Plan your survival, plan escapes. Do math puzzles in your head, or write poetry. Exercise, keep yourself in good shape, so you’re ready if an escape opportunity comes. Above all, there are two critical things you have to try to do . . .”

  The silence in the room was as brittle as spun glass.

  “First—and it’s impossible to emphasize this too much—for your own sanity, you have to establish some control over the situation; you can’t just let yourself be completely passive, completely in their control. Cooperate to the extent that you have to, yes, but at the same time look for ways that you can assert your independence—”

  The hotel desk manager, fussy and self-important in the timehonored manner of hotel desk managers at ritzy hotels, had come into the lounge and leaned over to whisper something to Ingimar.

  The vice-president listened for a moment, then pulled back to stare at the man. “You can’t be serious,” I heard him say, and a second later he was making for the elevator bank with the manager scurrying after him. The others paid no attention. It wasn’t uncommon for Ingimar to be called away from the sessions by one “emergency” or another, not to return again that morning or afternoon. Still, a little shiver of apprehension crawled down my neck.

  “Let’s see,” I said, “we were talking about . . .”

  “The two critical things,” someone prompted.

  “Right. Extremely critical. Second—and this is vital for your physical safety—you have to try every way you can to get them to recognize you as a human being, a real person, just like they are, and not simply as an object to—Tryggvi, did you want to say something?”

  Tryggvi, pale-haired, pale-eyed, slow-moving, and soft-bodied—a sluggish guy in the most literal sense of the word—was the head of quality control. Squirmy by nature, he’d really been fidgeting away for the past couple of minutes.

  “Yes, I do,” he said nervously. “I am worried about physical abuse. I’m pretty sure I can handle taking a crap in a bucket, but. . . . well, physical things . . . for example, what if they want us to confess our crimes against the earth or something, and they . . . you know . . .” His voice trailed away.

  “Torture you? That’s extremely unlikely, Tryggvi. If your abductors were political or religious terrorists out to shock or intimidate, that’d be one thing, but assuming that your captors—if you were to be taken—would be after a ransom of one kind or another, there’d be no percentage for them in torturing you. Or in mutilating or killing you, for that matter. It doesn’t happen very often.”

  This wasn’t good enough for Tryggvi. “But it does happen.”

  “Yes, it happens.” Here, let me show you where my little toe used to be.

  “So, how do you recommend we deal with it?”

  “My advice is to resist it for as long as you can possibly stand it.”

  Tryggvi looked shocked. He didn’t like the advice at all. Neither would I. Who would? “The thing is, I’m not sure how brave I am,” he said, looking down at his plump, clasped hands.

  “Tryggvi, it’s not a question of being brave, it’s a question of strategy. If you knuckle under and do what they want without putting up at least some resistance, then what you’re telling them is that the way to get whatever they want from you is through torture. You’re reinforcing their behavior. And that means that from then on there’s going to be more of it, not less of it. Which is probably something you’d rather not have happen.”

  “Yes, but I’ve never been tested, you see. I just don’t know how I’d stand up to physical pain.” A few of the others nodded uneasily. Someone’s nervous titter was quickly cut off.

  I came out from behind the portable lectern and sat on the front edge of the table. From the other five tables, gathered into a semicircle, the trainees watched me silently. Most had put down their pens. “Look, people,” I said, “I’m not telling you to stand firm while they cut you up into little pieces. Remember, if you do get abducted, the chances are good—way, way better than even—that you’re going to get out of it alive, and your first responsibility is to yourselves and your families—to be in decent physical and mental shape when it’s all over. If you do give in and deliver some kind of phony confession in front of a video camera, it’s no big deal. People know the difference between a real statement and a confession under duress.”

  “Mr. Bennett, do you have a minute, please?” The desk manager was back, leaning in from the doorway and looking distinctly put out. “They’d like to see you downstairs. They’re in the lobby bar.”

  “Take a break,” I told the trainees, and followed him to the elevator down the hall, feeling much relieved. The training had gotten into pretty squirmy territory for me as well, and I too really needed a break.

  Then I thought: They?
and got a touch queasier. “Who’s they?” I asked on the way down. “What’s happened?”

  He withdrew almost visibly into his desk-manager shell. “I think it’s better if you hear it from them, Professor,” he said gravely. A fist closed around my heart. Lori, I thought. Something’s happened to Lori.

  The Nordica’s lobby bar was a modernist, minimalist gathering of petal-shaped violet chairs and small cocktail tables in a wood-floored, white-walled nook formed by the arc of a curving white staircase. Closed at this time of the morning, it was empty except for Ingimar and a large man in a tweed sport coat and loosened tie at one of the tables and, in a far corner, a uniformed cop—short-sleeved pale blue shirt with epaulets, dark tie, dark pants—whispering earnestly into a telephone. Oh, Jesus.

  Ingimar was gray. He looked sick to his stomach. “Ah, Bryan, we have a situation, ah—”

  The other man, sandy-haired and sandy-mustached, with a kindly, deeply lined face, stood up slowly, took an unlit calabash gourd pipe, a huge pipe, a Sherlock Holmes pipe, out of his mouth, and handed me a business card. “I’m Ellert Ragnarsson, Mr. Bennett. How do you do? Please sit down.”