The Worst Thing

by Aaron Elkins

  Well, naturally enough, it was Lori who took up all my thoughts, all the energy I had for worrying. And right now I was primarily worried about whether or not they would really let her go. (“If you agree to the exchange, we’ll set her free, unharmed. Tonight, the moment we have you. You have my word on that.” Yeah, right, what could be more reassuring than that?) How could I trust them to follow through? How would I know for sure if they did? I couldn’t and I wouldn’t, but I didn’t see what there was to do about it. They held all the cards (this particular deck held only one card that mattered—Lori) and all I could do was hope they knew what they were doing. But the VBJ, from most of what I’d seen, was an amateurish group of bunglers, and that was cause for worry. Amateurs did stupid things. They went back on their word; they changed their minds; they killed their captives when they got scared. Experienced, more professional abductors, on the other hand, were usually more trustworthy, more true to their word—and more ruthless as well. When their demands were met, they generally released their victims. When their demands weren’t met, they followed through on their threats. To them, a captive was a means to an end. Merchandise, nothing more. If it had value, you took care of it. If it didn’t, you cut your losses and got rid of it.

  The VBJ had been anything but professional to date. Could I count on them to live up to their word and release Lori? What could I do but trust them and hope for them best?

  As we pulled away from the bustle of downtown and into the outlying neighborhoods, my own more personal situation began to niggle its way into my mind. For the second time in my life I was about to undergo the worst thing I could imagine: I was going into captivity once again. It had almost wrecked me the first time, when I’d been an innocent and untroubled child. Then, it had left me with a lasting legacy of panic attacks and night terrors. What would it do to me now? How long would it last? Assuming that Julian would do the negotiating, it might take two weeks; he was a famously slow, deliberate negotiator. Could I last two weeks?

  My trusty vial of Xanax—actually, a travel-size plastic Advil bottle—was in its usual place in my right-hand hip pocket, and on the way to the bus stop I’d practically had to hold on to my right wrist to keep the hand from plunging on its own into that pocket and going after it. But I knew it would be crazy to fuzz over my senses or to muddle my judgment any more than it already was. So I hadn’t, and as a result my head was in reasonable order, but my insides were twisted up in knots.

  I was scared right down to my toes of what lay ahead. Not of the possible torture or degradation that had worried the trainees. Not of the confinement itself, either, or of the awful helplessness and dependency that came with it, or even of the possibility of death. Those things I could and would handle if I had to. No, it was the panic itself, the panic attacks that would surely go along with them that filled me with dread.

  This was a distinction that nobody but a full-fledged, cardcarrying panic sufferer could possibly grasp. Say what? There’s a difference between fear of something and fear of fear of something? Oh, yes, you better believe there is, and anybody who’s been through one knows all too well that the nightmare terror of an unmitigated panic attack is immeasurably worse than the mere fear of driving over a bridge or getting on a plane or being locked in a little room or whatever your particular bugaboo happens to be. In the horrific clutch of an attack, the source doesn’t matter anymore. You aren’t really even aware of the cause. You know only two things: You are paralyzed with fright, alarm, terror . . . There’s no word in the language, in any language, that truly conveys its intensity. You are close to physically bursting with it. And you are either going to die from it or go crazy—right then, that second—because you know—you know—that nobody can stand this much stress and remain sane. That you’ve lived through them before, that they’ve always passed, that there is nothing actually threatening you; none of that signifies. Your mind is too disordered, too petrified, for anything like systematic thought. This time, you are utterly convinced, is different. This is the end, if not of life itself, then of reason.

  I know, I know; I’m wasting my breath here, trying to explain it. It’s impossible. If you have panic attacks, you know all this without my telling you. If you don’t, there’s no way you can really understand what I’m talking about. It’s bad; I’ll let it rest there. All I could do was hope they’d let me keep the pills. If they didn’t . . .

  As my caller had said, the BSI terminal was hard to miss, a big white barn of a building with bus bays all around it and “BSI” on it in six-foot-high letters. I was the only one who got off. At this time of day, eight-thirty, there wasn’t much going on; no long-distance busses loading or unloading and only a few cars in the parking slots. Through the glass doors of the building I could see a few worn-out-looking travelers on benches, but the ticket counters were closed down. Sunset was still half an hour off, so although the day had been gray and gloomy (a perfect match for my spirits), visibility was fairly good. I could see that the terminal and its parking areas were on an isolated island of asphalt in a big, empty field that was in turn ringed by roads and highways heading into and out of the city. At the far end of the field I spotted the smaller lot that I was looking for. Partially under a highway overpass, it held a few pieces of heavy equipment; no other vehicles. I guessed it was a parking area for road-maintenance crews.

  It took two or three minutes to walk across the stubbly, snowdusted field and when I got there I saw that I’d been right: nothing but a couple of snowplows, a sweeper, and something I took to be an asphalt hot-patcher. No likely looking kidnappers lurking among them. I leaned against a green snowplow, crossed my arms in front of my chest to stay warm, and waited. And fretted. I had nothing close to a guarantee that this guy would do what he said about Lori. I was confident that the Odysseus board would come through for me, but who knew how long it would take? I had no idea of what my confinement would be like. Everything I’d done since I picked up the telephone on that first call had been stupid, rash, and most definitely not by the book—and I truly believed in the book, or so I’d thought. Hell, I practically wrote it. Still, even given all that, what should I have done differently? Nothing I could think of, not with Lori’s life in the balance.

  The car’s engine was so quiet that by the time I heard it, it was practically on me, having come from a direction I hadn’t expected, on a narrow dirt road I hadn’t noticed. No, not a car, but a long, low-slung, black limo with a windowless rear quarter and a hatch in the back, like a hearse. It circled me slowly, tires crunching on the gravel. The windshield was black, impossible to see through. I stood my ground, turning as the van turned, staring at where the driver had to be.

  Having made one full circle, it stopped, facing me. The motor continued to purr. Other than that, the only sound I could hear was the intermittent swooshing of tires twenty feet above our heads. I could feel myself being studied. After a few seconds the two front doors swung silently open. This was it, then. My self-determination, my freedom, was at an end. I was in for it. Again. I couldn’t help doing a quick mental check for the usual warning signs of oncoming panic: Pulse pounding in the ears? No. Heart-in-the-throat sensation? A little, maybe. Shallow breathing? A little. Burgeoning, formless dread? Burgeoning, yes; formless, no.

  Now, it’s not as if I didn’t know that this kind of self-probing, hunting for cracks in my facade, was an extremely dumb thing to do: Seek, and ye shall find, right? But it’s not something you can help once you’ve been through panic hell a few times, and you’re anticipating a rerun. But in this case, thankfully, there wasn’t much to find. Now that the moment of truth was here, my insides had actually settled down. What I was feeling more than anything else was a welcome sense of resolution, of determination to see this through, to face whatever lay ahead. I suppose what made the difference was that I was doing this of my own free will and that I was doing it for Lori. I was grateful for the opportunity.

  Two men climbed out of the van, leaving the doors op
en, and approached me from either side. They wore ski masks (I would have been surprised if they hadn’t) under parkas with the hoods pulled up. No gloves. And no guns, at least not in sight, but then, why would they need them for this? Both about average height, but even with those quilted parkas and hoods I could see that one of them was small-headed and wiry and the other one, a little shorter, was on the pudgy side. On second glance, I decided the second one was a woman. Gullveig?

  “Where is she?” I asked. “Is she all right? Did you let her go?”

  I didn’t expect an answer and I didn’t get one. “Let’s go,” the wiry guy said and nodded to the woman, who produced a pair of handcuffs. The accent was Icelandic or Scandinavian, the voice breathy and intense. This was definitely not the polished, confident character I’d been talking to on the telephone.

  “Hey, come on, why do you want to do that?” I said. “I’m here voluntarily, aren’t I? Why do I need cuffs?”

  He made a get-on-with-it gesture directed as much at his companion as at me. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”

  The woman approached with the cuffs, and I held out my hands, wrists together. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I knew that, whatever it was, I’d be better off with my hands cuffed in front of me than behind, and I figured that this gesture of compliance on my part might make that happen.

  Not.

  “Turn around,” she said, and I did. Yes, it was Gullveig.

  The cuffs clicked on. “Too tight,” I said. “They’re cutting into me.”

  “No, they’re not. Be quiet.” There was a brief discussion in Icelandic between them, and Gullveig started searching me, first nonchalantly patting down the obvious places for weapons, then going through my pockets. She removed their contents—wallet, coins, comb, tissue shreds—and put them into a paper bag. When she came to the vial of pills, she started to put it in the bag with the rest.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I need those.”

  The eyeholes looked at me. “Why, what do you have?”

  “I have a heart condition. Um, cardiomyopathy.” Cardiomyopathy? Where had that come from? Was it a heart condition? I thought so; it sounded like one. Damn, how could I have failed to figure out exactly what I was going to say beforehand? I’d had the whole bus ride to work it out, and all I’d done was dawdle and worry it away. Okay, Bryan, focus! Get on the ball here.

  She read the label. “You take Advil for a heart condition?”

  “That’s just what I keep them in. It’s a travel size and it’s flat, so it fits in a pocket. Look, I have to take those every day. I depend on them.”

  She shrugged and looked at the man for guidance. He shook his head and motioned for her to drop it in the bag.,

  “I think you’d better let me have them back,” I said. “I’m telling you, I have a bad heart.” I forced a smile. “You wouldn’t want me croaking on you, would you?”

  I heard a nasty, snorty chuckle from the guy. “No, but I bet we could live with it if we had to.”

  “Not if you’re expecting a ransom.”

  “Forget it. You’re not getting them. You don’t have a heart condition.”

  “I’m telling you—”

  “I said forget it.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said with a don’t-blame-me-when-you-screw-up shrug, although it now felt as if I did have a heart condition. At the prospect of going without Xanax, it seemed to have shrunk to the size of a walnut.

  “Hey, didn’t I already tell you once to shut up?”

  In the meantime Gullveig had pulled open the rear door of the van. It opened not like a hatchback, bottom to top, but like a safe, from left to right, the entire rear end of the vehicle swinging smoothly on its hinges. She leaned in and arranged something inside.

  “In,” the man said.

  When Gullveig moved out of the way, I got my first look at the interior, and it stunned me. It was a hearse. Not only that, there was an open coffin inside, complete with fluffed-up pillow, its head toward the front.

  “You mean in the coffin?” I said. I couldn’t believe it. The world started wobbling.

  “That’s the general idea,” he told me. “Let’s go, we don’t have all night.”

  I stared at it. I could feel the sweat jump out on my forehead. I’d thought I was ready to do anything to get them to release Lori, but climbing voluntarily into a coffin, and not a very big coffin at that, well . . .

  “Hey, now look,” I said, as the panic coiled and tightened inside me, “what’s the point of—”

  “Relax,” the man said, “you’re not going to be in it that long.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He put a hand between my shoulder blades and shoved hard. Instinctively, I dug in my heels, literally dug them into the gravel, to resist. He shoved harder, pushing me up against the corner of the hearse, and I came apart. I just lost it. The panic took over completely. I remember trying desperately to pull away and run—I don’t know where to, but I know I would have run like hell, probably screaming all the way. I remember trying to butt them with my head, elbowing and kicking at them, snarling and begging, crying, cringing—who knows, probably drooling—the whole ugly show. Loss of face? Gone and forgotten. Self-esteem? Nowhere in sight. Lori? Who?

  “Jesus, this guy is really a wreck,” the guy said with icy contempt, but I just fought harder. That’s one of the worst aspects of this thing: You’re oblivious to shame. There is no room in your head for anything but blind terror, and you don’t care who’s there to witness it. Not at the time, anyway. Later is a different story.

  The man clubbed me on the ear with the heel of his hand, and while my head was ringing with it, the two of them bent me over and held me there, pushing my face down against the floor of the hearse. Something stung me in the right hip, and whatever tiny part of my mind was still functioning understood that they were drugging me. Thank God, I thought. Within seconds, the relief began to flood through me. I stopped squirming and was able to un-tense my muscles enough to let the burning fluid get into my system that much faster.

  When they started shoving me into the hearse again, I went along with the flow, already getting giddy and uncoordinated. I remember giggling when I went sprawling on the floor of the wagon because I had the illusion that my arms and legs were ropes, not limbs, and that was funny. And I remember the man saying in English, “Goddamn it, give me a hand with him, will you?” and then both of them grabbing hold of me while I continued to flop around and snicker.

  The guy grabbed a fistful of flesh at the back of my neck and shook, the way you’d shake the scruff of a recalcitrant puppy. The sudden pain took me by surprise, and I let out an indignant yell.

  He squeezed harder. “Shut your goddamn mouth, you bloodsucking bourgeois flunky!”

  “Stig, you’d better stop that. You’ll really hurt him,” Gullveig said.

  After that, as the murderer explained to the TV detective, my mind went blank.

  I awoke to the smell of disinfectant. My first impression, a calming one, was that I was looking down from a great height, onto the still surface of an immense, cloud-shadowed green sea, but when the world slowly tipped and righted itself, I understood through the torpor that I was lying on my back on a cot, looking up, not down, and that the distant infinity of green was five feet above my head; a bellied, sloping ceiling of green nylon fabric.

  So. I’m not in the coffin anymore, knock on wood. Now I’m in a tent. Next question: What am I doing in a tent? With no answer forthcoming, I did another self-check. Naturally enough, I was feeling generally lousy—achy, cotton-mouthed, and leaden-limbed—but I was rational, I was composed, and most of all, I was glad I’d done what I’d done. There was no intimation of imminent panic. The lingering sedative effect of the drug? Could be, but I preferred to think that I was starting to cope on my own. Maybe Zeta’s implosion therapy theory was working after all: By facing up to my fears, I was overcoming them.

  By t
urning my head I found the source of the disinfectant odor; a new-looking chemical toilet about a yard from my nose, a big, hassock-sized, top-of-the-line job. Well, if this was to be my prison, it was already quite an improvement over the squalid open bucket in the corner.

  The whole place was a big step up from Turkey. The tent was a roomy, straight-walled, cabin-style tent with enough headroom along the center line to let me stand up—not that I was up to getting on my feet quite yet. There were cartons of supplies—food, water, toilet tissue, that kind of thing—on the floor nearby. The tent had been set up indoors, I knew because, besides the disinfectant, there were indoor smells as well: floor wax, kitchen odors, house dust. And no sounds except for a fat, drowsy fly that hovered near my head, buzzing and stopping, buzzing and stopping. No, wait, I could just barely pick up the hum of traffic too—a highway, because it was steady; no stopping and starting. But it was far away and muffled by windows or walls. So I was definitely indoors. A house? A garage? No, a house; who waxed the floors of a garage?

  The ache in my head intensified. Too much thinking right now. I dozed again for a second—it seemed like a second—and was awakened when the fly settled on my cheek. I moved to brush it away, and was surprised to find my hands still manacled behind me. Damn, I’d forgotten about that. I knew the drug they’d shot into me was still working, because if it hadn’t been, the panic would surely have started to build right then. Oh, well. I shook the fly off, shifted from one side to the other to give my shoulders a break, wondered what time it was, and dropped off peacefully again.

  Chapter 18

  “You don’t mean to say they have Bryan now?” Julian Minor, his carry-on bag dangling limply from his hand, stared haggardly at Lori.