The Worst Thing

by Aaron Elkins

  “I wonder why they didn’t mention her in their message,” Ellert mused to bring me back.

  “Because . . . because she wasn’t part of the plan,” I said, thinking out loud as I clawed my way up out of my funk. “That message went out only half an hour after the kidnapping, so it had to have been prepared before, and they weren’t expecting to take her, so she wasn’t mentioned. It was an afterthought.” An afterthought!

  “So why would they have done so?”

  I shrugged. How the hell did I know? “Maybe they thought she heard something, or saw something. Maybe it was just an impulse: She was standing right there, so they grabbed her. People do crazy things under pressure.”

  “But then wouldn’t you think they would have revised the message to—”

  “Ellert, damn it, I don’t know,” I snapped.

  He stiffened. “Sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I apologize. I guess I’m just a little crazy myself, worried that . . . you know, that . . .”

  He nodded. It wasn’t necessary for either of us to say. If they had taken her on no more than the impulse of one overexcited kidnapper, what would they do with her? What had they done with her? My mind flinched away from the possibilities.

  “What happens now?” Ingimar asked me. “They said instructions would follow. How will they get in touch with us—with you?”

  I shut my eyes again for a moment and pulled myself together—relatively together. “It could go one of several ways. Written message, newspaper ad, e-mail, but most likely a phone call. So everyone who might be on the receiving end—the phone secretaries at GlobalSeas, you, your family—all have to be ready for it.” The question had done me good, calmed me down, put me on familiar ground. I was operating on automatic, practically reading aloud from one of my own manuals. “The minute they get off the phone they should write down everything they can about the caller: voice, accent, sex, age, how excited or calm he or she seemed. And any background noises they might have heard, even if they think they might have imagined them. Also, they’ll have to have a telephone number for me, so they can tell the caller I’m the contact person.”

  “We have cellular phones,” Ellert said. “We’ll give you one. You have no objection to its being monitored?”

  “Absolutely not.” A cellular phone was a good way to go. For one thing, it could stay with me twenty-four hours a day. For another, as Ellert obviously knew, cellular phones are the easiest of telephones to tap. Operating on radio waves as they do, it isn’t necessary to attach any gizmos to the phones themselves. You just tune in to the right frequencies—as long as you know what frequencies to tune to.

  “Also,” I said, “the minute a call comes in, whoever gets it immediately informs the police. Ellert, we’ll need a contact in your office.”

  “That’ll be me. I’ll give you my home number too.”

  “That’s helpful. Now, back to these people who might receive the first call: We want them to be polite and efficient. Just give the caller my name and number and tell him I’m the one to talk to. No anger, no pleading, no trying to resolve the case. And no trying to keep him on the phone longer so that the call can be traced. Nothing clever, nothing that might make him nervous. Clear?

  Ingimar swallowed and nodded. “I think so.”

  “I’ll write everything down for you. We’ll make a form everyone can use.” I already had one in an appendix to the training manual.

  The idea of a form reassured him. “Oh, that would be wonderful, Bryan.”

  My mind had been pretty much free to work on its own while I recited all that boilerplate material, and I had come to understand, with some surprise, just what it was I was feeling. Anger. Outrage. At God, at fate, at the monstrous flukiness of life, at the violent men who now held Lori. How was it that this could have happened to her? I was the one who was supposed to get kidnapped, wasn’t I? It had hovered over me, circled around me, almost my whole life. In any kind of logical, orderly universe it should have been me, not Lori, who’d been destined to stand on that particular loading dock, in that particular town, with Baldursson, at that particular moment.

  And there was something else that was gnawing at me too. I’d chosen not to tell her about the earlier attempt on him; I hadn’t wanted to make her uneasy—one basket case was enough. But what if I had? Would she have taken greater care? Would she perhaps have decided not to go to Grindavik at all? I remembered now that she’d told me this morning that she’d be spending some time at GlobalSeas, but I’d been deep in my prep and it had barely registered. I suppose I’d assumed she’d be at the Reykjavik office. How had she even gotten to Grindavik? Why hadn’t I—

  “What?” I murmured, conscious that Ellert had said something.

  “I was wondering, given what’s happened—about your wife, I mean—whether you still feel all right about handling the negotiation.”

  “Absolutely, why wouldn’t I?”

  “Well, if I were in your place, I might find it a little difficult to maintain the neutrality you referred to earlier.” He paused. The sad, pouchy eyes looked at me keenly. “Let alone remaining emotionally uninvolved.”

  I finished my Coke, set the can on the table, and gave him my steeliest gaze. “I can handle it just fine,” I said.

  His response was an acquiescent, you’re-the-expert shrug, but before his shoulders had settled back down, my saner self had taken charge. I let out a long, apologetic sigh. “No, I can’t handle it just fine. You’re right, Ellert. I’m the last person we want negotiating. Tell you what. Let me call Odysseus back in the States. I’m sure they’ll send over one of our negotiators. He should be the one who handles negotiations for Lori. I’ll stay in the background.” It was going to kill me just to stand by, but it was the right—the sensible—thing to do, and surely the best thing for Lori. “And then whomever Argos sends from London will want to handle the negotiations for Baldursson. Me, I’ll just help however I can.”

  “I think that’s wise. But until they arrive—if the VBJ should get in touch—you’re still the man?”

  I nodded. “Until then, I’m the man.”

  THE first contact came at 3:30 in the afternoon, about four hours after I’d finished talking with Ellert and Ingimar. I was on the balcony of our room at the hotel, where Lori and I had watched the sun go down only twenty hours earlier. The coffee cups we’d used, missed by the cleaning crew (who in their right minds would be having coffee on an outdoor balcony in Iceland in March?) were still on the round glass table. I’d been sitting there, zipped up in my parka, thinking hard for the last three of those four hours—or maybe thinking wasn’t the right word, because I’d made no notes, come to no conclusions, devised no plans. I’d just worried and agonized and dithered the time away, with barely any memory of what had passed through my mind besides what I knew to be the typical recriminatory what-could-I-have-done-differently-to-prevent-this-from-happening questions. Unfortunately, I came up with plenty of answers.

  Other than that, I’d been concentrating my mental energies, such as they were, on the cellular phone that the police had supplied me with, and willing it to ring. I know, I was supposed to be out of it now, waiting for the arrival from Odysseus of someone not emotionally involved. But with Lori in their hands, how could I not want to hear something now—do something now?

  How many movies have we all seen in which someone stares hard at a telephone and mentally commands, “Ring!” How stupid was that? And yet here I sat doing the same thing.

  When it did ring at last, I leaped to hit the receive button and waited, holding my breath. There was nothing.

  “Hello? Hello? Is somebody—?”

  It rang again, but, confusingly, from inside the room. Well, of course; how could they call me on the police phone if they didn’t have the number yet? Stupid! Even while running to answer the other phone I realized this was a warning to me of just how messed up my thinking was. I had to stop beating myself up and start thinking like the expert I was supposed
to be.

  This time when I picked up the phone I could hear start-and-stop traffic noises in the background. That figured. The call was probably being made from a pay phone on the street somewhere.

  “Bryan Bennett,” a woman’s voice said. Robotic, harsh, even when softened by the gentle local accent.

  “This is Bryan Bennett. Who am I talking to?”

  “You can call me Gullveig.” Possible meanings: It’s my real name. It’s not my real name. It’s my real name, but I’m putting it that way so you think it’s not my real name. “I am speaking for Project Save the Earth. In order to ensure the repatriation of the criminal Baldur Baldursson, we demand reparation in the amount of five million US dollars.” She was reading the words. “The money—”

  “No money, no talking, until we have proof of life.”

  “—is to be . . . What? Proof of what?”

  Was it possible she didn’t know what proof of life was? I didn’t like that. I preferred to be dealing with people who knew the way the game was played. “I need to know he’s alive. I need to know they’re both alive.”

  “What do you mean, both?”

  “I mean the woman as well. We’re not paying for dead people.” A shiver ran up my spine and squirreled in between my shoulder blades.

  There was a rustly sound. Gullveig was covering the phone while she conferred with someone else. “They’re alive,” she said. “Definitely.”

  “I can’t take your word for that, Gullveig. At this point, how am I supposed to know for sure that it’s your group who has them, let alone whether they’re alive or not?” It amazed me that I could make my voice sound so calm, so unconcerned. Or was I kidding myself?

  “What kind of proof of life do you need?”

  “The easiest thing would be to put them on the phone.”

  “That’s—no, I don’t—” The rustle again, and muffled whispers. “No, we prefer not to at this time.”

  It was what I’d expected to hear. Wherever Lori and Baldursson were, they weren’t in the phone booth or wherever with Gullveig. “All right, later then. What about calling me back, say in an hour or so, and putting them on then?”

  “No, not possible. What else would you accept as proof ?”

  I was ready with my reply. “Ask her what the dog gets as a lunch treat. Ask Baldursson where his Aunt Amalia lives.” The question and its answer, South Africa, had come from Ingimar.

  “I’ll see,” Gullveig said.

  “What does that mean, you’ll see?”

  “It means I’ll see. We’ll call you back. Stay by your phone.”

  “I have a cellular phone,” I said and gave her the number. “Better to use that one.” Whenever the next call came, I wanted the police on the line too.

  “Whatever,” she said.

  Chapter 14

  Camano’s head was killing him. He was boiling, trembling with anger and frustration. His trio of cretins had turned a meticulously planned operation—a beautiful operation—into a farce. They couldn’t have done a better job of bringing it down in ruins if they’d tried. Every caution he’d laid down had been ignored—no, subverted was more like it. If everything wasn’t exactly as anticipated, they were simply to forget the whole thing, quietly pack it in, and try again another day. How hard was that to remember? How many times had he banged it into their heads? And yet, when Baldursson had surprised them by appearing, not at his second-story door but down at the loading bay in the warehouse, they had proceeded merrily on. And when they realized he wasn’t alone but had this damn woman with him? No problem, full steam ahead. What the heck, might as well grab her too while they were at it. What could go wrong, right? Duh!

  And then, when Baldursson had produced a gun—all right, there the fault was partially Camano’s; he hadn’t known Baldursson was armed, hadn’t anticipated it—Stig had actually shot him—twice! This after Camano had laid it down as an absolute law that no live ammunition was to be used. Hadn’t they had enough experience with live ammo the last time they’d tried for Baldursson, when two of their members had been killed in the shootout? He had made them show him the 9-mm parabellum blank cartridges they planned to use in their Serbian-made semiautomatics. He had actually watched them insert them into the magazines. And then Stig, crazy, dangerous Stig, had decided on his own that he’d better bring along a second handgun “in case things went wrong,” as he explained afterward, when he was furiously confronted by Camano.

  “It’s a damn good thing I did,” he’d said mulishly. “He could just as easily have hit me with his next shot.”

  If only, Camano thought, seething but silent. There was nothing to be done about it now; the deed was done. Baldursson was dead. Useless. Instead they had the woman, and what good was she to them? Well, there was the slim possibility that she knew enough about Baldursson for them to have half a chance of coming up with sufficient proof-of-life information to make it appear that he might still be alive. If so, Camano might yet be able to salvage the operation. But what an unnecessary frigging muddle it all was.

  Now, if only Baldursson had managed to kill Stig, at least there would have been an upside, but no such luck. Instead, he’d hit Magnus, and now Magnus too was dead and useless (as opposed to being live and useless). But even dead, Magnus complicated matters. With him out of the picture, the logistical situation was turned on its head. For this kind of operation, a minimum of two people awake and available at all times was required. Which meant that Gullveig and Stig alone couldn’t handle it, assuming they required sleep from time to time. Which meant one more of the essential ingredients of The System would be kaput: Camano himself would have to be right there, on site, cooped up with the two of them, twenty-four hours a day, God help him.

  There had been a couple of times in the past when things had gone as haywire as this (almost as haywire; this one set a new record for fiascos), and he had aborted the operation and taken the next plane out. But this was different. That yacht waiting for him in Monaco beckoned him like a Siren. It was almost his now; he could practically see the two lounging, bikini-clad girls smiling back at him from the foredeck, and feel the smooth teak deck shifting and tilting under his feet as it knifed through gentle three-foot seas. How could he give that up without a fight?

  Gullveig and Stig had quickly gotten rid of the two bodies, hauling them down into one of the numberless, narrow lava caves that perforated the barren brown moonscape of the Reykjanes peninsula, and there he had no complaint. It was the one thing they’d done right. The corpses would never be found. He doubted that even Stig or Gullveig could locate them again.

  But what in God’s name made them stop in Hafnarmumblemumble and send the fax that they’d prepared earlier, just as if everything hadn’t gone so horribly awry? What was the hurry? Baldursson was dead; he wasn’t going to get any less dead or more dead. There was no reason they couldn’t have waited. Killing him had changed everything. Camano needed time to think it all through again, to replan, to consider whether it was even possible to continue. What would have been the harm in holding off on the fax for a couple of hours, or even a day?

  The needless death had made things immensely trickier. They were faced now with the problem of hiding the fact that he was no longer alive. How were they going to do that? How were they going to get around the inevitable proof-of-life questions, the kind where the guy on the other end of the line says, “Go and ask him what his ex-wife’s mother’s name is?”

  The more he thought about it, the more he thought the sensible thing for him to do was to walk out (his retainer he would not return; it was little enough payment for what they’d put him through) and leave the Two Stooges to deal with their own mess.

  Ah, but always his thoughts went to the Callisto, moored to its dock and gently bobbing in the sunny marina in Monaco. The damn thing called to him the way popcorn called to ducks.

  And so, back to the woman. When the proof-of-life questions came up, with any luck they could get the answers from her, or
at least enough information to finesse the negotiator. They could say that they couldn’t ask Baldursson any follow-up questions right now because he’d been injured and was in a semi-coma, but they’d learned some things from him as he’d drifted in and out of consciousness. Lame, but workable if played right. If that were the case, he would stay with it, at least for now. If not, he would be on a plane tonight.

  As for the woman, now that he thought about it, the simplest thing would be to get whatever she knew about Baldursson out of her, then get rid of her—her body could go into one of those thousands of lava caves with the others. That way no guard duty, no tedious, dangerous period of captivity, and, best of all, no holing up with these imbeciles.

  Yes, there was hope yet.

  It was time to have a look at the woman.

  Chapter 15

  Someone had come in. Or opened a door, or turned on a light, or rolled up a blind. She knew because the gray-black mesh that was her entire field of vision had lightened by a few shades.

  “Is someone there?” she asked.

  Even with her hearing deadened by the painfully tight rubberized bandage that encircled her head, she was sure she’d be able to make out the sounds, if not the words, if someone were to say anything. She ached to tear the thing off, but she’d been told—by a woman; Icelandic accent—not to touch it, and she wasn’t about to. She understood that seeing their faces did not improve her chances of survival.

  “If there’s anybody there, I can’t hear you.” Her voice sounded muffled and small, but the strain in her throat told her she was shouting.

  No reply. Assume someone is watching. That’s what Bryan said you were supposed to do. Don’t show fear or desperation or despondency. What she felt like doing was screaming, and that she wasn’t going to do. She’d done enough of it earlier, when there had been all the shooting and confusion, and Baldur had spurted a horrifying gout of blood from the side of his neck and collapsed half on top of her. She’d screamed then, all right, and passed out—or perhaps taken a blow to the head?—because there was a gap in what she remembered. She had no memory of how the shooting had ended or how she’d gotten into the van, but only a gluey, dreamlike trudge toward the vehicle, with poor, blood-soaked Baldur, his legs barely working, being hauled along by the elbows. Now, looking back, it seemed like something that had happened to someone else, or like something she’d seen on television.