d4

by Sherrie Cronin

  “No, I will not fly without a co-pilot,” he said. “That’s a stupid thing to do.”

  Baldur rolled his eyes. Okay, it probably was stupid.

  “I have a compromise,” Baldur said. “I don’t want to involve any more people with this flight than is absolutely necessary. Geirs, my head of security, will be one of the two men on board. I’ll make a few calls and see that his co-worker that day has a pilot’s license. I’ll even make sure that he’s been checked out on a Hawker 800 and I’ll get the paperwork forwarded to you ahead of time so you don’t have to worry. Can you work with that?”

  “You think you can find this person with almost no advance notice?” his pilot asked.

  “The security company I contract with is phenomenally accommodating,” Baldur assured him. “I’ll let you know if there’s a problem. If you don’t hear from me, it’s wheels up for you at ten-thirty tomorrow and all you need to do is just focus on flying the plane.

  ******

  Zane stared at the tiny ancient woman with skepticism written all over his face.

  “She doesn’t speak English. I’m her great-grandson. I can translate for you,” the teenaged boy said. He had driven his grandmother, no make that his great-grandmother, halfway across Iceland in winter to meet Zane at the cheery yellow and black Kronan grocery store on the south edge of Reykjavik. The three of them were standing next to the frozen pizzas.

  “Her children played with Baldur’s parents. She knew those parents, she’s met their two sons, she says she can find Baldur’s brain for you.”

  Zane winced a little at the terminology but he thought he got the idea even though he was severely jet lagged and still getting his arms around this whole telepathy thing.

  “We just need a vague sense of what Baldur is planning,” Zane answered. “We think he’s going to try to kill my sister. I’m here to help her, but I need some idea of where to start.”

  The boy nodded, and he turned to the elderly woman and spoke in Icelandic. She listened, they exchanged a few words, and then she closed her eyes, leaned back against the freezer, and started to moan and keen. Zane looked around in embarrassment, but nobody else in the store appeared to be particularly bothered. This went on for several long minutes until finally the woman stopped and opened her eyes wide and yelled what had to be an obscenity in angry Icelandic.

  “Langamma!” the boy said, embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he added to Zane. “She’s not herself when she comes out of these.”

  Zane was quickly deciding that this was a colossal waste of time on a day when he had no time to spare, but then the woman began talking to her great-grandson in rapid words filled with fury. She went for two or three minutes before she quieted down.

  “She says that Baldur has become a very bad man. Very selfish, very greedy, and now he prepares to kill a red-haired girl—she could be your sister—to protect all his money. She knows details, and if you like she says that she will give them all to you.”

  Well, Zane did have to admit that it sounded like the woman had found Baldur’s brain all right.

  “Tell her yes, I would like to know everything she can tell me.”

  27. Last Day of Trading

  Ariel slept poorly. The next morning she treated herself to all of the room service coffee she could hold while she fooled around on her computer and sent a terse email back to the office letting them know that things were progressing as expected. Then she had an idea. She found a 12:45 a.m. flight out of Iceland that night and booked a seat, deciding to tell Baldur late in the day that she was leaving right after the two of them finished that evening. She doubted that he would let her go, but maybe if she caught him by surprise he would still be hesitating about what to do with her and she could be gone before he came to a decision. It was worth a shot.

  She didn’t even bother with business clothes, but just pulled sweats over what she had worn yesterday, crammed everything into her suitcase, and then checked out of her room.

  She took the cab through the dark streets of Reykjavik to arrive at the d4 offices by 7:30. Baldur was already in his trading room fooling with his screens when she arrived. Sigrun gave her a careful “Halo” and then reached across the reception desk and squeezed her arm. The silent, hidden gesture spoke volumes. I’m here, it said. I’m on your side.

  Tears started to well up in Ariel’s eyes, as fear, fatigue and gratitude mixed together to form something almost too strong to control. Ariel managed to stop the tears before they flowed down her face. She took a few breaths, and marched into the trading room.

  Baldur looked up, glanced at his watch and said nothing. Ariel removed her outer layers of clothing in silence and crawled up onto the table as though she was preparing for a particularly uncomfortable root canal. She looked at the clock. Twenty minutes until the opening bell. She should have slept later. She closed her eyes and tried to doze.

  Twenty minutes later when he laid his left hand just below her neck and started trading without so much as a hello, she was annoyed,

  “I’m here,” she hissed.

  “I can tell,” he answered without looking in her direction.

  “Fuck you,” she answered and she felt his hand tighten slightly on her throat, though he said nothing. Then as he finished typing in something rapidly, he added, “Fuck you too.”

  Ariel changed her position twice after that and Baldur readjusted his, but neither of them said another word for the next four hours.

  “I’ve ordered in lunch,” Sigrun said as she knocked on the door and walked in. “It’s a little too cold on the roof today, so I set you up in one of the conference rooms. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Sure,” Baldur said. “We need to stop for a bit anyway.” He turned to Ariel. “Stretch your legs. It will help you to stay alert.”

  “I’m alert,” Ariel answered. Sigrun tiptoed out without saying a word.

  After lunch Baldur and Ariel once again worked in silence, but Ariel had to stop twice in the afternoon to ask for coffee and go to the bathroom. Baldur looked irritated each time Ariel took a break, but he said nothing.

  In the ladies room she took the time to stretch her muscles as well as she could, moving effortlessly into a few of her favorite yoga poses. This wasn’t just for the sake of her own comfort. Although the windowless restroom offered no avenue of escape, and in fact the eighth floor office itself offered her no easy way to run, she had to consider that she still might have to sprint on foot or even try to fight, once the trading was over. She needed her body as well as her mind to be at its best.

  They took another one-hour break in the early evening, and Ariel took an analgesic for the fatigue headache that had started hours ago. Sigrun brought in sandwiches and insisted that she would stay in the office as long as they did, in case they needed anything. This time Baldur didn’t argue with her. Ariel thought that he might have been relieved not to have to be alone with her.

  “I’ve changed my airline ticket and I’m going to fly home tonight,” Ariel said as she lay down on the table after dinner. “There is a red eye over to Copenhagen that I can make easily if I leave here when New York closes. I’ll have lots of ways to get back to Dublin from there.”

  Baldur shook his head. “You should have discussed that with me first. I decided over dinner that I’m going to need you to stay through the night tonight. We haven’t made as many trades as I had hoped, and so we’re going to work both Tokyo and Hong Kong once they open. We need to get some exposure in Asia before you and I call it quits.”

  “I thought you said last time that was the one place that we were the least effective. Why would you want to bother?”

  “I did say that,” Baldur answered, “but I’ve decided that we need to use every avenue open to us. You’ll stay the night.”

  “I will not,” Ariel said, deciding that she had nothing to lose by pushing back. “This wasn’t part of our agreement and I don’t do all-nighters.”

  “Yes it was and yes you do. The agreeme
nt was that you stay until I decide that we are done. We’re not done. We’re going to try the Australian Securities Exchange tonight while we are at it; I think we might do better there. You’ll make more money too, and we’ll stop at dawn. You can go home first thing in the morning.”

  Ariel was exhausted, and her muscles were cramping, and she was tired of playing games. “What if I refuse?” she asked.

  “You won’t,” Baldur said with confidence. “You see, I’ve learned more about Mikkel over the last week. I once thought he was merely a man with a silly dream about outer space. Useless, in my personal opinion, but he was entitled to it nonetheless. If you wished to help him with it, then that was your business too. However, my former secretary seemed to think that your boyfriend,” Baldur put extra sarcasm on the last word, “had some misguided lofty idea that he is saving humanity by doing this. Clearly we’ve moved beyond impractical and gone into the realm of the deluded, here, don’t you agree?”

  “I wonder whatever gave Hulda such an idea?” Ariel said.

  “I wondered the same thing. So I asked. Turns out she had developed a bit of a social relationship with some of you over at Ullow that I was unaware of. I found the omission odd. Don’t you?”

  “What happened to Hulda?” Answering an awkward question with a question of your own was one of the best business strategies that Ariel had ever learned.

  “I’d like to know that myself. She seems to have gone missing. Didn’t show up for work at the end of last week and I finally had to go hire a temp. And yet, here you are, and so I have to conclude that you are still interested in helping Mikkel. From what I understand, you are helping Cillian too.”

  “I am.”

  “And yet, I have to ask myself, what sort of girlfriend goes to these kind of lengths just to help fund a project of a man she is dating?”

  Ariel said nothing.

  “That’s what I thought. You believe this nonsense, too, don’t you? You wouldn’t dream of coming here and doing this with me except that you’ve bought into Mikkel’s insane idea.”

  “It’s far less crazy than you think,” Ariel said. “Mikkel’s cousin Siarnaq…”

  “I know all about Mikkel’s cousin Siarnaq,” Baldur said, with no patience. “I’ve met him. He believes every bit of every gloomy outcome he’s ever seen a possibility for.”

  “That’s not so unreasonable. You believe what your abilities tell you. And mine, too,” Ariel said.

  “True. Because we can test them out. There is no way to test the sort of nonsense Siarnaq is worried about. Who knows what will really happen in hundreds of years? Honestly, who cares? Why—seriously—why would a beautiful girl like you with a bright future ahead, why would you throw away one bit of your own opportunities to protect people that you will never meet? Something bad may happen to them and maybe it won’t and you’ll never know.”

  Ariel realized that from Baldur’s point of view, the question made perfect sense.

  “If you were late to catch a plane and on the way you saw a building burning with no one around, would you stop and call the fire department because the fire might spread and hurt people?” Ariel asked.

  “It depends,” Baldur said. “How windy is it? How bad do I want to make the plane? Can I call while I’m driving? What are the odds someone else will call?”

  “Suppose you are able to know that it is the worst combination of all of those,” she said.

  “Okay. If the flight is extremely important to me, I keep driving. If I get time once I board the plane, then I call.”

  “It’s too late by then. There is an orphanage next door and the kids have all burnt to death.”

  Baldur laughed. “You do believe this nonsense, don’t you? That’s the best I could have hoped for. You’re not here because you’re being nice to a guy you think is cute, you’re here because you imagine that you are somehow doing something important, making a sacrifice that is going to matter to the whole human race.”

  “And that makes you happy because?” Ariel asked.

  “Because you’re tired, really tired, and you want to go home tonight. And yet you are going to give me your absolute best all night long until I have done everything I need to do. You’re going to do it because you think you’re saving humanity and this extra trading will help you do that. That is great. Hilarious, but great.”

  He turned away from her and starting typing into his keyboard and said no more.

  A couple of hours later Baldur turned away from his screens abruptly. “Your mind is wandering again, you need to get up and move around. I have to make some phone calls anyway.” He chuckled. “Take a break from saving the world and be back in fifteen.”

  Baldur patted her on the arm the way one might touch a silly but cute pet. It was a gesture with no thought or meaning, but it was all that she needed. His touch took her to his frequency for a second and she saw him a minute from now, making a phone call, and she knew what the call was about.

  He was calling the hangar to confirm a change of plans he had made that morning with his plane and his flight crew, a change of plans intended to result in Ariel’s death. Her mind flew to the far outlying probabilities she’d seen a few weeks ago, and she remembered a puzzling premory of her floundering in ice cold water, getting drowsier by the second as she fought to maintain consciousness while she knew that there was no possible way that rescue could arrive in time.

  The plane must go down over the ocean. Baldur was probably going to insist she accept a ride home in his plane and then maybe fix it so it would have problems. Somehow she would survive the emergency landing and would make it safely into the sea, and then she would die of hypothermia there. She and someone else. Or he might live and she died. Or she might live and he died and that was incredibly sad too. The slight probabilities that she had seen and ignored were now approaching certainly. What to do? How could she change these odds?

  Ariel headed to the restroom, thinking it might help her think if she could splash some cold water on her face. She saw that Nell, disguised as Sigrun, was just leaving the ladies room and Ariel motioned with her head. Nell understood and turned around and went back inside. I have an ally here, Ariel thought. There has to be a way.

  “Do you know anybody over here?” Ariel whispered once they were inside.

  Nell shook Sigrun’s heavy black hair. “No, but Hulda does. She’s in my earpiece—she’s listening to everything, giving me instructions, translating Icelandic for me. Hey, any good actor can fake an accent, but I hardly speak of the language. So they’ve got her patched in so that she can handle phone calls directly while I listen in, and then she tells me what was said. It’s how I’m managing. She’s also checking in with your office every so often, letting them know that you’re still okay.”

  That made sense. “Can Hulda possibly help you find a wetsuit at this time of night? A really good one, with booties and gloves and hood and enough tape for all the seams? Five millimeters thick at least, and six would be better.”

  Nell stared at her.

  “I’ve done some diving. I know something about this. Look, I’m pretty sure I’m going to need one by tomorrow. No, I’m going to need two. Somebody is going to be with me and I don’t want him to die. So it’s not Baldur. The pilot maybe? It’s a he, so make the second suit sized for an average male.”

  Nell looked at her watch. It was almost eight thirty at night so buying wetsuits wasn’t an option. “Hulda probably can figure out a way to do this,” Nell said, “but then what?”

  “Get the suits here somehow. Throw away all the clothes in my luggage—just make sure that Baldur doesn’t see them. Then cram the wetsuits into my suitcase. That way I’ll have them with me, and I’ll find a way to use them. I’ll have to figure out how the plane goes down. It can’t be a crash. Maybe he puts a hole in a fuel tank?”

  Nell started at her through Sigrun’s face. “Look under the wetsuits for guns and knives, too,” she said. “Personally I think those might be more usefu
l and I’m going to stash any weapon in there that I can get my hands on.”

  Ariel started to thank her, but they heard Baldur calling for Sigrun from the hallway. Nell put her finger to her lips and left the restroom.

  As the evening moved on towards late night, Ariel insisted a couple of times on a bathroom break and each time she gave Nell a questioning look. The first time Nell shook her head and shrugged, but the second time Ariel got a smile and a nod.

  It was almost three in the morning when Sigrun brought in more coffee and slices of cake. Baldur agreed to a break, saying that he needed to stop and make a few more calls. This time Ariel checked both exits and found a security guard posted at both. Of course. Running had never been a good option. She did a quick fifteen-minute yoga routine in the ladies room, begging her body to stay alert. On the way back, she saw Nell with her head on Sigrun’s desk, sound asleep.

  “Why didn’t you just have me come over here for three days instead and do this in shifts?” she complained to Baldur in a none-too-friendly tone as she came into the room.

  “In retrospect I should have,” he agreed. “I am wearing out as well, you know. But now that you’re here and we’re pushing our way through, let’s finish and be done with this and done with each other.”

  A few hours after that Baldur’s trades began to drop to one every ten or fifteen minutes, and Ariel suspected that they had both run out of steam. The first glimmer of light finally appeared in the window around 9 a.m., although the slow sunrise was still an hour and a half away.