The Worst Thing

by Aaron Elkins

  So, apparently I hadn’t said it silently. “Yes, I can speak rationally,” I replied with all the self-possession I could dredge up, but my voice caught in my throat, thick and phlegmy.

  I opened my eyes. I was alone in the tent.

  “Are you there?” I asked, meaning “Are you really there, or is the drug playing games with my mind?”

  “Oh, we’re here, all right.” The man again.

  No, wait, not just “the man.” I knew what his name was . . . Stig, that was it. In the parking lot, Gullveig had used his name in front of me. That in itself was something to think about. For obvious reasons, kidnappers who knew what they were doing didn’t do that. So either these two didn’t know what they were doing or she had inadvertently let the name slip. Either way, pretty amateurish.

  Then again, “Stig” might be a fake name invented for my benefit, but I didn’t think so; it had slipped in too spontaneously. Or—and this one I didn’t want to dwell on—they might not care if I knew their names because they had no intention of ever releasing me. But if that were the case, why the hoods? Well, there was an answer for that too. It might be that they wanted me to think that they would eventually let me go, because that would make me less desperate and thus easier to deal with.

  Or it could be . . . no, overthinking things wasn’t getting me anywhere. Wheels within wheels.

  I could see where they were speaking from now. There was a mesh window in one wall of the tent, and they had lifted the outside flap that allowed them to look through it. The light streaming through a window behind them turned their heads into featureless silhouettes, but it provided information as well. It was daylight, not artificial light. And it wasn’t gray or rosy; it was bright yellow sunlight, so I knew that we were now well into the next day.

  The flap was then drawn down over the window, and a larger flap over the entryway was zipped open. They came through quickly, with Gullveig carrying a tripod and a video camera. I was able to get another glimpse of the outside world through the open entry, but all I saw was a blank cornflower-blue wall and a section of hardwood flooring. Still, at least it confirmed that we were inside, not outside.

  Gullveig set up the tripod near the entrance, about six feet from where I was, and fiddled with the camera, then started it running on its own and came a bit closer, careful not to block the lens.

  Stig stood a few feet away, arms folded, eyes narrowed, keeping watch. They both wore black woolen sweaters, stiff, heavyweight black pants, and simple black ski masks, the cheapest you could find, with two teardrop-shaped openings for the eyes and a slightly larger oval one for the nose and mouth. Well, maybe not the very cheapest. In Turkey they’d used potato sacks with a couple of rough holes torn out.

  They wore thick woolen socks, no shoes. That was to keep me from knowing when they were or weren’t nearby.

  “Can you stand up?” Gullveig asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said truthfully. “I’m a little woozy.”

  “Give it a try,” said Stig coldly.

  Having my wrists clamped behind my back was more of a problem than the dizziness. As I swung my feet awkwardly to the floor I realized that I was without shoes too. And no belt. Along with my parka, they’d been taken away. Standing up brought a stab of pain to my head, but all in all I felt physically sound for the first time since they’d jabbed the needle into me. More important, my mind seemed to be working right again.

  Gullveig waited until I was reasonably steady on my feet before starting. “We are informing you that you are being detained by soldiers of Project Save the Earth, Verkefniđ Björgum Jörđinni. Please state your name for the record.”

  “What record would that be? What is this being filmed for?”

  “Please state your name for the record,” she repeated in precisely the same dull monotone. And I mean precisely, as if she’d hit rewind and play again. It occurred to me that she might not have been reading from notes when we’d spoken on the telephone, after all. It was simply the way she spoke.

  “Okay, my name is Bryan Bennett.”

  “And you are an agent of the Odysseus Institute for Corporate Protection in New York?”

  “I’m a research fellow at the Odysseus Institute for Crisis Management and Executive Security. In Seattle, not New York.”

  “State your duties.”

  No. Name, rank, and serial number were all they were going to get, and they already had their equivalents. “I’d appreciate knowing about my wife.”

  “State your duties.”

  “No, not until I know something about—”

  Stig made an impatient noise. “Come on, this is ridiculous,” he told Gullveig. “You can do this later. Look at him. He barely knows where he is. People will think we drugged him.”

  “You did drug me,” I said, regretting it before the words were out of my mouth. Reminding them of last night wasn’t something I wanted to do.

  Stig had caught a glimpse of my manacled hands behind me and pointed at them. “You forgot his watch,” he said to Gullveig. “He doesn’t need a watch.”

  I began to object but caught myself and kept quiet. The more they knew that I wanted something, the more power they had over me. The thing with the pills had already given them the upper hand, and I wasn’t going to add to it. Besides, I already knew enough about Stig to understand that asking for it would have been pointless.

  So Gullveig unstrapped my reliable old $24.95 Casio and took it from my wrist. I stood submissively while she did it, but I wasn’t as woozy as Stig thought. My mind was hard at work, sorting data, hatching plans. I knew things they didn’t know I knew. They’d made sure to situate the tent’s entry so that when it was opened it revealed nothing but that blank wall. However, they hadn’t taken similar care with the mesh window, probably not thinking of it as a way to look out. Its flap had been up only five or six seconds before they’d come in, and their heads had blocked much of the view, but you can take in a lot in five or six seconds if you pay attention, and I’d been paying attention.

  What I’d glimpsed was part of another wall, this one with a single shade-covered window, in front of which was a green plastic student chair, the kind with a tablet arm, with a folded newspaper on the arm. That would be the guard station.

  Just to the left of the window was a small telephone table. A couple of feet to the right was a doorless corridor, perhaps ten feet long, leading to a kitchen, of which I could see a part. The place was not a dump by any means. Bright, cleanly painted walls, blond wood flooring, big, expensive, stainless steel refrigerator in the kitchen. It was all new, or at least newly renovated; the opened tent admitted smells I hadn’t picked up before: wood dust, paint, plaster.

  But it was the window that had gotten my attention. An ordinary enough window with two sliding panes, one above the other, with the top pane opened a few inches. It was covered by one of those shades that close not from the top down, but from the bottom up. The shade hadn’t been pulled all the way up, but only to just above eye level, so I could see through the top foot of the upper pane. What I saw were the winter-bare top branches of a spindly tree a few feet from the window, and behind that, fifty yards or so away, what appeared to be two identical five- or six-story brick apartment buildings, so new that many of the units were unfinished; I could see stepladders and paint cans, and some of the windows still had crisscrossed tape on them. I assumed that I was in a similar building, part of a complex, and that this particular apartment had been chosen because the units around it were not yet occupied.

  That window was going to be my escape route. Sooner or later there would be a letdown in vigilance. The guard in the chair would be deep in his or her newspaper, or possibly—even better—asleep. If I could figure out a way of silently getting the entrance flap up, I’d simply head straight for that window and hurl myself through it, praying that the canvas shade would keep me from being shredded by the glass. Somebody would surely be in the guard chair, but I had only a few feet to cover—i
t would take me less than a second to reach him—and I’d count on momentum and surprise to barrel right through him. The spindliness of the tree outside told me it was young and small, which meant we were on the bottom floor, so the ground would be only a few feet down. I’d launch myself through the window headfirst, or rather shoulder first, and hit the ground rolling. The headlongthrough-a-glass-window thing was worrisome, but I wanted to make sure that I didn’t break a leg by landing awkwardly on it. Better to be cut up than unable to run.

  Even if I were still in handcuffs, I thought I could do it.

  Okay, I agree, not what you would call an elegant plan, but for starters it wasn’t bad. Was I serious? Would I really try it if the opportunity arose? Truthfully, I didn’t know, but at some point I would have to come up with something. I was as sure as sure could be that the nights would bring on the panic attacks, and they were likely to be humdingers. While I was prepared to make it through one or two nights of them, or even three or four if I had to (or so I told myself), I knew I couldn’t possibly stand much more than that without truly going bonkers.

  In any case, what I did know was that concocting even a plan as rash and dubious as this one was a healthy way to occupy my mind, and that was good enough for me at that point. If I ever did put it into action, the part I’d have to worry about was getting the tent flap open without alerting them, especially with my hands manacled behind my back. If they caught me at it, there would be no second chance.

  I realized Stig had been talking to me. “What?”

  “I said, why aren’t you dead yet?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your pills. You need to take them every day. But you didn’t take them today. Why aren’t you dead yet?”

  “Give me time. The day’s not over yet.”

  Stig was not amused. He made an impatient motion at Gullveig. “Let’s get on with it.”

  With what? I wondered nervously.

  Gullveig produced a padlock and a length of chain from somewhere and locked one end of the chain to a corner of the bed frame. Then she asked Stig something in Icelandic, but her gesture toward my handcuffed wrists made clear what it was. She wanted the key. Stig gestured with his chin to the rooms outside the tent. “He keeps it,” he said. “I’ll get it from him.”

  A minute later he was back with it and handed it to Gullveig. “Turn around,” she told me, and I did. Standing behind me, holding the free end of the chain in one hand, she used the other one to waggle the key into the key slot in the left cuff.

  I guess my mind really was more sluggish than I thought, because it took until then for me to understand what was going on. Once she got that left cuff off my wrist, she was going to slip a link at the free end of the chain over one of its arms and snap it shut. I would be chained to the bed by my right wrist. Chained! Good God, I hadn’t expected . . . The second I was hooked up to that thing, any plans for escape would become pointless fantasies. This “cot” of theirs was no lightweight aluminum job. The frame was heavy-duty steel; it had to weigh thirty pounds, minimum; more likely, forty. There was no way I would be going anywhere dragging that thing behind me.

  Which meant—

  The key clicked.

  —that it was now or never.

  I knew I had only a fraction of a second to act: the tiny window of time between the time she got the cuff open and the time the link was slipped over the cuff’s free arm. Make my move too soon, and I’d still have my hands manacled behind me. Too late, and all was lost; I’d be shackled to the bed. I closed my eyes to focus on my hearing, waiting for the soft snick of the ratcheted arm opening out. Every muscle in my body was tensed and ready. Gullveig, holding both the chain and the key and having to keep the cuff steady as well, was having trouble, fumbling a little.

  “Do you need some help?” Stig said irritably.

  Say no, I commanded.

  “No, I don’t need any help. Ah, here it comes . . .”

  And there it was, the sound I was waiting for, the almost inaudible slipping of steel on steel.

  I bolted. I’d been standing facing the cot, my arms behind me, and I spun quickly around, at the same time pushing off from the bed frame with my foot to gain all the thrust I could. The plan, if you could call it that, was to head straight for the loosened entrance flap, bowling over anybody in my way. Gullveig, standing almost directly behind me, would be caught totally off guard and easily bulled out of the way. Stig was off to one side, two or three steps from my prospective path, and I didn’t think he could react quickly enough to block me.

  Once I made it through the flap I’d be home free; just a couple of yards, maybe two running steps, to the window. There, if nobody was right on my heels I’d use the little table to smash the glass. Otherwise, I’d just have to launch myself through it—a considerably less appealing prospect. Still, that canvas shade would surely provide some protection. And—for me, at any rate—a faceful of lacerations and a broken bone or two were risks I was more than ready to take to escape being chained up like that. Once through the window and on the ground, I’d be yelling like hell and running as fast as I could.

  That was the plan.

  But you know about plans.

  Gullveig, standing right behind me, was first on the list of bowloverees, and, exactly as planned, I lowered my head and rammed into her with one shoulder, assisted by the impetus I got from pushing off against the bed. But the blocky Gullveig turned out to be one of those people who are made of heavier, denser materials than the rest of us. My push got a grunt out of her and a single step back, but that was all. It took a second, more protracted thrust to force her back one more step, where she slipped on a roll of paper towels and went over backward, safely out of the way.

  But.

  The extra second that was consumed was enough to give Stig his chance. Moving with the darting quickness of a cat, he reached out as I shot by him and snagged the cloth of my sleeve. I spun completely around, tearing the sleeve and leaving him with a handful of cloth, and he went over backward too, helped more by his own momentum than by anything I did. That left both of them sprawled on the floor, and nothing in my way between me and the tent entrance.

  But.

  In flailing as he toppled backward, Stig knocked against the camera tripod, upending it, and wouldn’t you know it, my legs got tangled up in the struts, so instead of eventually launching myself headfirst through the window as per said plan, I wound up launching myself headfirst through the open tent flap, getting tripped up yet again by a three-inch-high band of fabric at the bottom of the entry, and then managing to stagger two wobbly-legged steps before executing what I believe is called a right shoulder roll. I ended up on the wooden floor of the room, half sitting, half lying against the blank, windowless wall directly in front of the tent, with the breath partially knocked out of me. I was a good eight feet from the window. It was all over.

  Chapter 20

  My head hadn’t finished bouncing off the wall before Stig came scrambling sidewise from the tent like a fiddler crab. When he reached me, he stood there, muscles taut, fists tightly clenched, watching me haul myself up against the wall.

  What now? As near as I could tell, his intention was other than to lecture me on my misdeeds; the guy meant business. Stig was unsettlingly quick and obviously fit, but he wasn’t a big man. At six feet and a hundred-and-seventy-five pounds, I probably had fifteen pounds on him and four or five inches in reach. My eyes wandered briefly back to the window. If I could get my hands on him the right way, I could probably throw him out of the way and still make it out before anybody else got to me. Maybe I could even throw him through the window.

  But.

  Did I forget to mention that my hands were still cuffed behind my back? Well, they were. Apparently the arms of the cuff hadn’t quite opened completely when I broke free, and the sudden movement had jammed them shut again. So there I stood, not in the best shape of my life, with no usable weapons other than my stockinged feet and
my head. I decided the latter was the better bet, and I lowered it preparatory to butting him in the midsection.

  But before I’d gotten my head halfway down, it exploded with fireworks-like pinwheels of light. I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything more painful. I didn’t know what hit me—that is, I was reasonably certain it was Stig, but I couldn’t imagine what he’d hit me with. I found out when he did again—to the same spot, just under my nose—every bit as excruciatingly as the first time. And then, yet again. I fell back against the wall and slid down it, blinded and near-paralyzed with pain.

  As I sank, he came down with me, so that he was on his knees astride me, and what he was doing was hitting me with his fist, but not with your ordinary, everyday, ho-hum punch. He had formed the fist with the fingertips not folded into the palm, but up against the undersides of the fingers, so that the striking surface wasn’t the big knuckles of the hand, but the far sharper middle row of finger knuckles. Something out of the martial arts, I assumed. And he wasn’t swinging powerful, roundhouse rights and lefts but short, stiff, precise, stylized jabs, all to my upper lip, which I now knew to be one of the most devastatingly sensitive areas of the human body. The intent of punches like that wasn’t to knock one unconscious, but to cause as much hurt as possible. And let me tell you, they do the job.

  I was utterly helpless, my mouth full of blood, tears of pain streaming down my face, trying to twist away from him. But he was still at it, sometimes missing his target now, so that the rest of my face took some of the blows—not quite as painful, but bad enough— when he suddenly stopped with his right hand still cocked for yet another shot.

  Only then did I realize that another voice had come into play. “For Christ’s sake, do you think that’s really necessary?” it had said tightly, a schoolmaster reprimanding a willful ten-year-old.

  “I don’t think I need you to tell me what’s necessary,” Stig grumbled, breathing hard. Poor guy was winded from beating me up.