The Worst Thing

by Aaron Elkins

  “Five seconds,” Minor said. “And how many bills would you guess it would take to comprise three million dollars in equal numbers of ten, twenty, and fifty dollar notes?” He drew a tiny calculator from his jacket and began punching in numbers with his pinky.

  “I have no idea,” Ragnarsson said, “but I suspect you’re going to tell me.”

  “It would take”—dink-dink—“a little under thirty-eight thousand notes in each denomination,” Minor said, rolling along in his element, “a total of about”—dink-dink—“one hundred and fourteen thousand bills. At five seconds per note, that would come to five hundred and seventy thousand seconds, or nine thousand five hundred minutes, which is”—dink-dink-donk—“one hundred and fifty-eight hours. Now. Were you to assign three people eight hours a day to the task—which you couldn’t do on account of unavoidable errors resulting from fatigue and boredom—it would take”—dink—

  Ragnarsson held up his hand. “I take your point, Mr. Minor,” he said dryly, sinking back into his chair.

  “—almost seven days,” Minor finished. “One entire week.”

  “Yes. All right then, I think we can dispense with the marking idea.”

  “And concurrently, you have no objection to my placing the advertisement as written?”

  “None whatever. Julian?” He reached across the desk, offering his hand. “I’m glad to have you with us.”

  LYING on his bed with a moistened towel pressed to his eyes and his head pounding, Camano emitted a pent-up groan, partly of suffering, but mostly of exasperation. Both were the result of the increasingly absurd, frustrating, and dodgy situation in which he found himself.

  Stig was even more dangerous than he’d thought. Stig was crazy. Camano had entirely misjudged him. Wild-eyed Stig might be, but he was no anarchist, no communist motivated by airy-fairy dreams of bringing down a corrupt, greed-bloated world so that a free, fine, equable one might be rebuilt in its place. No, Stig was not an ideologue at all; he was a hater, pure and simple. He’d hated Baldursson. He hated Bennett. He hated all he thought they stood for. That summed up his worldview. Magnus Haldorsson’s overheated, undercooked professorial rhetoric had provided a framework to hang it on by giving form, vocabulary, and even rationale to his instinctive, corrosive loathing for the agents of authority, for the corporate world, and for pretty much anything in or representative of the established order.

  Worse, he was extravagantly, mindlessly violent. The shooting of Baldursson could be explained (but probably wasn’t) by the excitement and tension of the moment, but pulping the face of the handcuffed Bryan Bennett like that? What was the excuse there?

  It wasn’t that violence in itself offended Camano’s sensibilities; he had never shied from violence when the situation called for it. Several of his one-time captives were getting along nowadays with fewer appendages (fingers, ears) than they’d once had, and as four murdered hostages would attest—if murdered hostages could attest—he hadn’t shied from execution either. But in every one of those instances he had acted with prudence and foresight, not animal passion, so that full ransoms had been collected even when the ransomees no longer existed. And then, come to think of it, there had also been a few other removals along the way—hirelings who turned out to be too greedy or stupid or inquisitive—but no great loss there.

  As to the current situation: Bryan Bennett was going to be killed too, that was a given, and Camano looked forward to personally attending to it. But not yet. It would have to wait a little while. Killing him now would jeopardize the ransom negotiations. He would do it in his own time, in his own way. And, oh, the miserable sonofabitch would know who was killing him and what for; otherwise, where was the satisfaction in it?

  Bryan Bennett had stolen seven years—seven years!—of Camano’s life. No, worse than that, he’d turned them into seven blighted years of degradation, squalor, and wrenching despair; seven years of living hell. He’d done it through guile and lies, and he’d gotten away with it! Ever since, Camano’s dreams and plans of vengeance—no, let’s be more precise, of retribution, righteous and just—had nourished him, even kept him alive, in the darkest days. He had fed off them and hugged them to himself. The day would come when he would act on those plans; he’d known it would.

  And then, against all odds, fate—it couldn’t have been mere chance—had dumped the man into his lap without any work on his part. In a supreme twist of irony—how the gods must be laughing—he had come of his own free will, thinking that his expertise had prepared him for what he was in for, but having no idea of what awaited him. But when it was time, Camano would carry the act out coldly, surgically, and not, as with Stig, in a blood rage. To give in to your emotions that way, as Stig had done, was to admit you’d been beaten at your own game even though you held every possible advantage. And that, to George Camano—to Paris—was anathema. Had Stig been a mere paid helper rather than one of the clients, and had there been anybody else to replace him, he would have gotten rid of him as soon as Baldursson had been shot. But this was Iceland. There wasn’t anybody else. He was stuck with Stig, and with Gullveig.

  Gullveig. He had misjudged her even more fully than Stig. It was Gullveig who was the ideologue. Not only that, it was Gullveig and not Stig who turned out to be the VBJ’s moving force. She was slow and plodding and heavy, yes, but she was dogged and insistent, and she never . . . ever . . . gave up. Stig grated on his nerves like sandpaper on raw skin. Gullveig was Chinese water torture: drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . insistent and unrelenting.

  This he had discovered when he drafted the second letter, the one about Bryan Bennett. He had given the draft to them to look over in case he’d said something inapt from a local point of view. Stig, uninterested, had shrugged and passed it to Gullveig, who had used a ballpoint pen to insert the usual mind-numbing locutions: “Amerika-dominated,” “anthropocentric ecodestroyers,” “corporate leeches,” and the like. Camano had crossed them out one after the other, patiently explaining that with the death of Baldursson things had changed; efficiency and stripped-down simplicity were now crucial. When it was all over, they would have plenty of money to get their message out. Gullveig had sulked, but she’d apparently accepted it.

  Then, five minutes later she’d trudged up to him again with her face like a block of wood. “Why shouldn’t we take advantage of getting our message out now?”

  He’d explained again, and again she plodded sullenly off.

  Then, five minutes after that: “Why shouldn’t we at least . . .”

  And then: “Why shouldn’t we . . .”

  In the end he’d won out, giving her a single sop, “corporate lapdog,” to shut her up. But, Christ, she was wearing him raw. And then last night, after the pickup in the parking lot, she’d come to him with the insane idea of making a video with Bryan. Absolutely not, he had said. Too many possible clues for the police. Didn’t she know that a trained police technician could bring up background sounds they themselves weren’t even aware of?

  “What trained police technician?” she had responded. “This is Reykjavik, not New York.” And she’d stomped off in another sulk. Twenty minutes later she’d started in on him again. “Why couldn’t we just . . .”

  For the sake of his sanity, he had compromised: “All right, go ahead and make your damned video—but it is not to be released until after the ransom is paid and Bennett has been let go. Is that understood? ”

  He could see from her dully smug reaction that she’d considered it a victory, and so it was, he was forced to admit. But then there had come this morning’s fiasco—while they were supposed to be recording—and Bennett had tripped over the damn camera and broken it. This was of no concern to Camano as far as making a propaganda video went, but that was the camera with which he’d planned to keep a constant, all-seeing eye on the prisoner and thus provide a little welcome relief from the pressure of guarding him, short-staffed as they were.

  Afterward, Gullveig had come clomping up to him. “We�
�ll need to buy another video camera now.”

  “Fine, fine,” he’d said, his head already beginning to throb. But on reflection he’d changed his mind. This video recording thing was a bad idea, and sending one of these two to purchase another camera at a local shop was begging to turn disaster into catastrophe. No, things were complicated enough; the video was out. Period. And this time, he would not be cajoled or wheedled or pressured into amending his decision. Gullveig could sulk all she wanted; she would just have to live with it.

  The only problem was that he hadn’t told her about it yet. So now, here he was, hiding from her in his room until his headache relented enough for him to face her drudging, slogging persistence.

  This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. Maybe it really was time for him to retire. He refolded the towel so that a cooler surface lay against his eyelids, and tried to bring up visions of the Callisto, its sails ballooning, scudding along on a foam-flecked Mediterranean, under a deep blue, cloud-dotted sky.

  Chapter 22

  I woke up more angry at Stig for taking away my watch than for beating the bejesus out of me. This is not to say that I was willing to let bygones be bygones about being punched silly, but that was, after all, more or less a personal matter. But the watch . . . that was serious. The kind of situation I was in—isolated, inside a tent inside a building—was a kind of sensory deprivation, with much of the uncertainty, dissociation, and disconnect that went along with it. Every link to the real world, the world outside the tent, was precious, and knowing the hour was something solid to hang on to, proof that you still were a part of that world. Without it, without some way of measuring how long it had been from one event (or, more likely, nonevent) to another, you were adrift in time as well as in everything else. I was just going to have to figure out some way of approximating it.

  I lay there with my eyes closed for a while, doing another self-assessment. How was my pulse? How was my breathing? Was I starting to panic? No? Good. But was I starting to panic about starting to panic? It was like poking at a toothache with your tongue to see if it still hurt or if maybe it had gone and healed itself, and it was just about as useful. I was depressed and anxious, yes, and I had a hell of a headache, and my upper lip was swollen and sore, but it didn’t take a self-assessment for me to figure that out.

  “. . . what you need to understand, and accept,” I’d told the trainees yesterday (only yesterday?), “is that you’re going to undergo one of the most devastating experiences that a human being can have.”

  And now here I was, living it (again!), while they were probably in the Hilton coffee shop, buzzing about this latest turn of events—assuming they knew I’d been taken. (And there was another source of disconnect—not knowing if anybody knew what had happened to me.) I shook my head; life was full of ironies. But looked at the right way, I was luckier than any of them would have been in my place. I knew what to expect, and I had some idea of how to cope with it. I was an expert; I got paid for thinking about this kind of thing and providing advice for others. I knew all about the mind games and the psychological stumbling blocks better than my kidnappers did. This time around, I wasn’t a helpless five-year-old in a Turkish dungeon.

  Looked at another way, though, things weren’t so hot. It had been many years since I’d had to get along without Xanax; that vial in my pocket had been a happy crutch for a long time. Most of the time I took no more than two or three a month, but several times a day I’d check my pocket to make sure they were there, just in case. And now, “just in case” had arrived in spades, and no Xanax. The prospect of seeing a string of attacks through on my own was, to put it mildly, daunting. To put it not so mildly, I was petrified. Now that I was up against it, truly Xanaxless, Zeta’s advice—focus on the feelings, face them down, stand up to the bully—seemed childish and even cruel, the kind of advice that could be given only by someone who hadn’t been there herself.

  I did come up with a plan of sorts. I had never yet gotten a full-fledged attack other than at night, after several hours of sleep. My “plan” was simply never to allow myself more than an hour or two of sleep at any one time. Somehow, I would keep myself awake during the nights (or what I thought were the nights) and take catnaps during the day to make up for them. I would do my napping sitting up too; no lying down . . . just in case.

  Which meant I should have gotten up right then, like it or not, because I was growing sleepy, but when I tried, I was swamped by a tremendous billow of nausea and dizziness as my head came up, and I fell heavily back. A minute or two of lying there without moving and the worst of it passed, but I needed to wait awhile before trying that again. I’d allow myself twenty minutes—what I guessed were twenty minutes—and give it another shot. But better not close my eyes, though.

  I blinked hard a couple of times to clear my vision and looked around me. As I’d told the GlobalSeas people, the first item of business was to get your mind productively engaged . . . and that meant reconnaissance. Study your surroundings, see what you were up against. And one could get a head start on that even from a supine position. So what, exactly, were my circumstances?

  The tent, with smooth, almost straight-up-and-down nylon walls and a rubberized polyester floor, was about twelve by twelve, and a little over six feet high along its center ridge. The cot I was lying on had been set across the center line, but up against the back, as far as possible from the entrance. The light, harsh but not bright—something like thirty watts was my guess—came from a naked bulb, not inside the tent, but outside, on the other side of a small mesh triangle under the peak that was probably there for air circulation.

  The cot was two feet wide, with a thin, new-seeming cotton-felt, gray plaid mattress. I lifted a corner of the mattress and saw that it lay on a taut canvas support attached to the metal frame by a series of sturdy, oval metal loops, like the links of a chain. The frame had three sets of tubular legs, the U-shaped, full-span kind that wouldn’t damage a tent floor, one at each end and a double one supporting the middle. My cuffed right wrist was chained to the right-hand corner of the frame near the head of the bed, my right ankle to the lower right-hand corner near the foot. No sheets, no pillow, but there were a couple of folded blankets on the floor underneath.

  The other items in the tent, besides the hassock-sized, hassockshaped, lidded portable toilet, were a plastic kitchen garbage pail, six one-gallon plastic jugs of water, a one-liter plastic jug of the kind of milk that doesn’t need refrigeration, and two grocery cartons, one without its lid, one with. I could see what look like packaged snack foods inside the open one. The closed one had a bag of tortilla chips on top of it. Nearby lay two plastic-wrapped rolls of paper towels, one with a dent where Gullveig had slipped on it.

  Okay, fine; all the comforts of home. Now what were the chances of my getting myself out of there? My first attempt had been well short of a rousing success, but I wasn’t through trying. First, a look at my restraints. I lifted my manacled right hand to my face to have a better look at the handcuffs. They were a sturdy, standard-issue set, each of the two cuffs made of a pair of curved arms hinged together, one ridged, one hollowed, with the ridged one sliding into the hollow one and ratcheting into place as it went. One of the pair was clamped tightly around my right wrist, and the other was clamped on the last link of the chain that led to the bed, where the other end was padlocked to the frame. The cuffs could be moved in only one direction—closed. This I brilliantly proved to myself by unintentionally clicking them a notch tighter. Not enough to cut off my circulation, but enough to make the sharp double-rim pinch. Ouch. I wouldn’t be making that mistake again.

  I wondered at first if it was going to be possible to break the cuffs apart by twisting my body round and round until the linkage between them snapped, but no, I soon saw that they were connected by two heavy metal links that rotated freely around each other. Clever, these handcuff manufacturers.

  As for the loop of chain around my ankle, I spent a good ten minutes trying to
work it over my heel, but all I accomplished was skinning the painful Achilles-tendon area at the back of the ankle and wearing a hole in my sock.

  With a sigh, I quit fooling with the cuffs and the locks. I was enough of a realist to know that there was only one way to get out of them, and that was by getting hold of the key—an improbable prospect, but something to think about.

  I’d been shifting around on the cot while examining the restraints, and I was ready to try standing again. Merely sitting up brought on a wave of vertigo, but not as bad as what I’d felt before. Worse was an overall feeling of lethargy and weakness. Caused by the dregs of whatever they’d shot into me, I supposed, and then, the beating I’d taken hadn’t done me any good either. In addition, except for that brief burst of energy that carried me a whole dozen feet, right up to the wall—smack!—facing the tent entrance, I’d been slumped and inactive on the cot and, before that, in the coffin, for maybe fifteen or twenty hours, all told.

  I wrote myself a mental reminder: Keeping in shape physically was going to be as important as staying mentally alert. You never, never knew when an opportunity to escape was going to come up—a mistake on their part, a miscalculation, a momentary letting down of their guard. Who knew how long I’d be here if I had to wait out the negotiations? It had taken fifty-nine days the last time. And a lot of things could go wrong during negotiations. There was no guarantee that I’d get out of this alive, let alone sane. So if my chance did come up, I wanted to be ready to take it, but if I let myself go to seed, I’d turn sluggish and dull. That meant I’d have to work out an exercise schedule and stick to it—sit-ups, push-ups, stretches, resistance training, running in place. All of that could be done in the tent, even with the chains.

  It would be tricky to set up a regular routine without having a watch to keep track of the time, but there was a way around that. I knew that, given my druthers, I ate a big breakfast and a big dinner and skipped lunch because I didn’t get hungry at midday. Thus, assuming that the food cartons meant that I was on a feed-myself-when-I-feltlike-it schedule, I’d exercise every second time I felt hungry, before sitting down to eat; that would do for a rough once-a-day strategy. It would also be a means of keeping track of the passage of time.