“This man is my ally. If you’re my friend, you will help him anyway you can.”
“I’m definitely not that much of a friend,” Ariel said and she disconnected the call. It made her sad to realize that this was pretty much how their conversation had ended the last time.
The trip from Keflavik International Airport to the spa was less than half an hour by limo. The Ullow group consisted of Ariel, Eoin, Brendan, and Jake traveling together. Cillian and Nell would arrive at KEF later by chartered jet and meet them at the spa around noon.
Jake and Eoin were checking out the bar in the limo, behaving like college kids getting to act like they were movie stars. Ariel ignored them as she pretended to check her email. Brendan was lost in his own thoughts as they drove, and, judging from the look in his eyes, he had plenty to cause him worry. He and Ariel would both be flying back the next morning, while Jake and Eoin were making more of a holiday of the outing.
Ariel both reasoned and premembered that the less time she spent in Iceland the better. It was a real shame, because the country itself was gorgeous and the people outside of Baldur’s boardroom were friendly and welcoming. She’d turned on her music so she wouldn’t have to make conversation, and she had to smile when one of her favorite songs began to play. Arcade Fire’s “Sprawl II” was a melodic worry about endless strip malls covering the earth, and the beauty of the scenery she was driving past could not have been a better antidote to those concerns. Ariel turned up the volume, put her phone away and simply enjoyed the views for the rest of the trip.
Once they arrived, they were met by their assigned host and taken to an ultramodern lounge where they could shower privately and change into swimwear. Ariel studied the famous murky turquoise water as they walked, and the combination of all the shades of blue and green in the mist created a feeling of wonder unlike anywhere she had ever been. She marveled at the many small geysers that shot into the air and at the sheer size of the stunning lagoon.
She’d already been told that there would be a catered lunch, time to relax in the healing waters, individual massages and skin treatments, and more spa time before the group headed to what was certain to be a lavish dinner. Under other circumstances, this could have easily been the best day at work ever.
Bloody Marys and pretty little snacks greeted them, along with Ulfur and his apologies that Baldur had been detained and would be arriving later. Several of the board members, however, were already enjoying the private lagoon, he added. Might he suggest that the Ullow staff take this occasion to get to know them better?
Ariel dutifully headed off to the mandatory shower, her most business- and family friendly one-piece in her hand. It wasn’t exactly a burqini, but it was the young woman’s moral equivalent of one, the swimsuit you can wear around your boss and your great-uncles. She had just stepped under the hot water, her eyes closed as she enjoyed letting her muscles relax after the travel, when her skin jumped. The touch was electric and familiar and she opened her eyes to see Baldur’s arms circling her from behind, his right hand moving up to quickly cover her mouth.
“Don’t scream,” He hissed. ”You’ll embarrass us both and to no end. Just hold still and let me concentrate. I need to understand what happens when I touch you. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want information.”
Ariel turned enough to see that Baldur had on his swim trunks, and true to his word he kept his arms and hands around her waist, leaving her bare breasts alone. His eyes were closed. He pressed his entire body hard against her back, and she couldn’t help but notice that he was having the expected response to holding a naked woman in a shower, but he made no move to do anything about it.
She was even more annoyed that he had chosen to run his little experiment while she had no clothes on and he did, and she considered several moves she had learned in self-defense classes over the years. Coming down hard on his instep with her heel seemed like her best bet. Oddly enough, it was his very touch that gave her the ability to see how effective that and other moves would be. She hesitated.
There wasn’t much she could do about being naked at this point, so why not gather a little intel of her own? If her experiences with Siarnaq were any guide, Baldur was now seeing weeks and months ahead, but at his natural pace. That meant he’d be getting quick little snippets of information, probably of the kind he was most used to handling. She was going to bet it had to do with fluctuations in stock prices at some time in the future.
She, on the other hand, was more than a helpless woman being held in a shower stall. For all that Baldur took, he could not help but give back to her as well. Touching him, she saw the near future, not in his little snippets but rather at her own natural pace.
She saw him walking out of the stall, in less than a minute, with no harm done. He would be silent, too engrossed in trying to remember the new information to apologize, thank or threaten. It was the most likely and the least messy alternative. As she realized that, it became a near certainty, and then the wave of time washed over the moment and the soon-to-happen became the now and it then it became the past, and Ariel found herself standing alone and naked in a shower stall. She reached for her towel.
Mikkel arrived at the Blue Lagoon a little after 3 p.m., after almost changing his mind and not going at all. The last reports from Peary Land had been bleak. In the snow-free far desert north of Greenland, where the days were twenty-four-hours long well into August, this should have been the most productive time of the year for his project. But problem after problem had begun to plague the operation. Insufficient or poorly made materials kept arriving. Workers quit unexpectedly. Everything was suddenly going wrong. The situation cried out for him to get himself up there now and find out what the difficulty really was.
He suspected sabotage, but for the life of him he could not imagine why. So he had come to Iceland instead. If something other than a massive string of bad luck was occurring, there could be more information to be gained at this little fluff of an outing than in the middle of his assembly room floor.
It was possible that Baldur was becoming annoyed at him for piggybacking on his success. Everything Mikkel had learned about Baldur indicated that the man was logical and obsessed with making money. Given that Baldur was making plenty of it, Mikkel could not imagine why the man would waste any of his gains just to stop another man from doing well too. Did the man have an illogical side to him as well? If they met, maybe Mikkel could tell more.
Plus, this outing would give him a chance to see Cillian, and it had been far too long since he and Cillian had talked. Granted it was going to be no place for letting down one’s guard and speaking frankly, but there was a chance that he and Cillian could find a way to have a private word or two. If he told Cillian about the suspected sabotage, he could see if Cillian had any ideas.
Mikkel gratefully accepted a cold beer from an attendant in the private suite, and decided that a short soak in the legendary healing waters might rejuvenate him before he tackled difficult issues. He asked after his host and was told that Baldur had not yet arrived but that others from d4 were outside enjoying the amenities and looking forward to greeting him.
A few more questions established that the older Irishman and his girlfriend were having a private couple’s massage and that two people from Ullow were out in the lagoon somewhere. The redheaded woman was having a facial and one of the men from Ullow was in the sauna.
Mikkel was asked to make himself at home. The group had been requested to gather together for cocktails at five in the private lagoon, so would he please be kind enough to return by then.
Ariel had no idea whether Baldur had learned everything he wanted to know, or what his next move might be. She tried to find a quiet spot in the private part of the lagoon where she could regroup. She let her body sink into the thick warm water, amazed at the strength of its calming influence even under the circumstances. She was dismayed when only moments later the only Icelandic woman on the d4 board waved to her through the mist, and
made her way over to Ariel’s location.
“There you are.” She spoke in a heavy Icelandic accent as she got closer.
“I was just going to close my eyes for a few minutes,” Ariel said, intending fully to ask the woman to leave her be for a while.
“Oh, I’m afraid that I can’t let you do that now,” the woman said cheerfully. “You and I have a facial and an algae wrap scheduled. Baldur thought us women might enjoy that. He didn’t know that man from Ireland was going to bring his girlfriend along or he’d have scheduled one for her also. I personally don’t understand people just assuming that they can bring a guest.”
“I suspect that Cillian is used to doing what he wants without asking anyone for permission,” Ariel observed.
“That’s just what Baldur said about it,” the woman replied.
Ariel reluctantly got up out of the water and followed the lady through the cool breeze into one of the many small, windowless rooms used for spa treatments. As she stepped into the room, it occurred to her. The comment about what Baldur said not only meant that Baldur was at the spa already, but that the woman knew he was there, too.
There were no attendants inside, only Baldur and two older men sitting in front of three computer screens arranged around a single treatment bed, all typing away. Ariel thought she had met one of the two men when she made her presentation back in January.
“Thanks Gróa,” Baldur said without looking up from his screen. “Stay if you like.”
“No, that’s fine, you gentlemen go ahead.” Gróa left with a wave.
“Lie down,” Baldur told Ariel, pointing towards the thin massage cot, without even looking up towards her as he said it.
“Shit no,” Ariel said and turned to follow Gróa out. But the door had shut and, of course, it was firmly locked. The two men who stepped out of the shadows looked like hired muscle, and they had bulk and surprise working in their favor. They had Ariel strapped to the table in under a minute, in spite of her quick attempts to use every self-defense move she could think of.
“You want us to stay?” one of them asked Baldur, rubbing his Adam’s apple where Ariel had landed a surprisingly painful punch.
“No, wait outside. We need to keep her alert, though, so she could be trouble. Don’t go far.”
“Yeah, this one is a fighter,” the other one added. Among other things, he had taken a knee to his groin, but luckily for him Ariel just hadn’t gotten enough force or aim to make it as damaging as it should have been. “We’ll stay close.”
Ariel tried to breathe calmly and clear her head as she tried to determine what parts of her were restrained where. What did she have to bargain with? They needed her conscious, but did they need her to be cooperative? Perhaps they didn’t know whether they did or not.
“Don’t you think we should remove her clothes?” the older of the two men asked hopefully. This man was the one that she hadn’t seen before, and he spoke with a heavy British accent. While the front of her brain jumped to an instinctive fear at his question, some distant part of her mind reasoned that he was why everyone was talking in English.
“No,” Baldur said, with a firmness in his voice that quelled Ariel’s budding sense of panic. “There’s plenty of skin there for all of us to touch, and no one needs that distraction. Just do what I said earlier. Get information. Buy and sell futures, buy and sell options, we need options on futures and we need lots of them. Do whatever comes to you, but make sure it has a nice clear high probability. We will make some mistakes. I know for a fact that she is never certain about what she sees, and that’s why we need lots of trades. We get one chance to test out this approach, gentlemen, so let’s make it count.”
The other older man ran his hand up the inside of her bare thigh and smiled at her. Ariel’s considered whether she could manage to spit in his face.
“Don’t waste time, Valdi,” Baldur said. “We’ve got to be ready for Gróa to be in here having an algae wrap and a facial in thirty minutes. So focus.”
So that was his plan? He’d simply segue this bizarre experiment into a spa treatment and pretend like it never happened? Like hell she was going to sit through that.
She pushed against the plastic ties binding her hands and feet, trying to work any one of them loose while the three men ran their left hands absently over her body while their right hands typed orders onto a screen. In minutes all three seemed to be in an almost trancelike state, not even noticing when one of their hands grazed the top of her boob, and moving back off her swimsuit whenever they found themselves touching it.
Flickers of their precollections began to make their way to Ariel and it was reassuring that what she got from the three of them touching her constituted the most boring premories she had ever received. Her mind was filled with knowing that the Brit was about to look into commodities, and that thigh man would move on in a few minutes to either small cap companies or emerging markets. Baldur would almost certainly go to complicated option strategies next. She supposed that she was getting this kind of information because there was no other kind to get and that was good news. It meant that the men almost certainly posed no other threat to her.
She wondered if they were getting information from her besides stock reports for the next several weeks. She generally got information about family and friends, classes, dating, clothes, her job, things that mattered to her. She didn’t get weather reports or sports scores or investment advice. She’d never tried to. She’d never wanted to.
Was there a sort of muscle memory involved here? It was the human brain after all, and a mind tended to keep doing what it was used to doing. These three men all seemed to spend much of their time investing online. Didn’t frequently used neural pathways get stronger, making a brain more efficient at doing those activities that it had lot of practice doing already?
Ariel allowed herself to study the three faces of her captors, each illuminated by the glow of his own backlit screen. They looked only part human as they typed, willingly becoming nothing more than organic interfaces between her premories and the machine that could turn what she knew into gold.
I’m Rumpelstiltskin, she marveled silently. No, wait, I think I’m more like the straw. Or the spinning wheel, but I guess it doesn’t matter because those stories never end well for anyone, do they?
A faint chime began to sound. ‘Two minutes,” Baldur warned his companions without looking at them.
“Finishing now,” Valdi said, all thoughts of Ariel’s thigh long since gone from his brain.
“I’m out,” the Brit added and his screen turned dim.
Baldur finally turned to her and addressed her directly.
“It will be several weeks before we begin to see the results of today’s work. I’m not used to having to find such patience, but I will, because the potential rewards here are enormous. Thank you for your assistance, begrudging though it may have been. Now relax, and have a nice spa treatment.”
He waved something in front of her nose and she suddenly felt dizzy, then groggy, then very, very sleepy.
She came too, and she still couldn’t move. She could feel that the plastic restraints were gone from her wrists and ankles, which was excellent, but now her arms were held tight and useless at her sides with her body completely encased in some kind of weird body cast. What the hell? Her eyes flashed open but she was blindfolded too. Shit. She tried to scream but her whole face was held immobile by what felt like glue. They had buried her in something? They were going to kill her now? Why?
She squirmed in panic, and heard a reassuring woman’s voice speak in Icelandic.
“I think that she only speaks English,” another woman said, and that second woman sounded like Gróa.
“You’re awake,” the pleasant voice said, this time in English, and Ariel found herself looking at two slices of cucumber being lifted off of her eyes. “They help so much with the little fine lines,” her beauty therapist confided. Ariel looked down at her body. She was wrapped in a cocoon of ga
uze, and coated in a thick casing of mud. The same think mud appeared to coat her face, and Gróa was covered in it.
“I’ll get this off of your face so you can talk,” the woman said pleasantly, reaching for a warm washcloth. “I think I used too much aromatherapy on you at the beginning. You got really woozy, started saying a lot of odd things—I was worried that we might have to stop the treatment.”
“It is lucky that you look just fine now,” Gróa said sweetly, “with prettier skin and all. I hope you didn’t have bad dreams?”
So that’s how they were going to play it? Ariel was pissed, really pissed. The beauty therapist had to be in on it too, otherwise she couldn’t imagine how else Baldur could have pulled off the switch. “Fuck you both,” she said under her breath.
“I’m sorry I don’t understand English so well,” the therapist replied as she moved on to sponging the mud off of Ariel’s legs.
“I think you’re still recovering from the reaction to the, what was it again? I think it was lavender and peppermint. Perhaps you need to avoid those two when used in combination, yes?” Gróa said.
“I have no problem with lavender or peppermint,” Ariel said. “I have a problem with people acting like lying assholes.”
The therapist looked at Gróa and Gróa nodded. “Perhaps I need to keep you here longer? For your own safety, until you calm down?”
Right. She apparently needed to calm down in order to get out of here.
“That won’t be necessary. I’m feeling calmer by the minute.”
“Very good,” Gróa said. “If that’s the case, then once she gets you cleaned up and all that mud and gauze removed, you run along. I know that they need a little incident report about your reaction to the treatment at the front desk, but don’t worry, I’ll fill it out for you. It’s just for their records, in case there is any kind of problem later.”
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