by Aaron Elkins
The exercise plan bucked me up; it meant that I was beginning to take some responsibility for control of my own life; well, to give it some thought, anyway. Gingerly I pushed myself all the way up onto my feet, relieved to see that the dizziness had mostly passed. I ironed out various bodily kinks with a few knee bends and slow stretches, then returned to my reconnaissance.
The chain from my wrist to the cot was about eight feet long, but the one on my ankle was only three. That allowed me, with a few contortions, to reach a maximum of seven feet from the cot, leaving me a couple of feet short of the entrance. That was why I’d been ordered to leave everything where it was; so that I wouldn’t be able to set myself up to surprise anyone showing up there. But even if I did move it, so what? I couldn’t see how merely getting within reach of someone was likely to do me much good while I was trussed up like this. I’d have to come up with something better.
I shambled the couple of steps to the cartons—clank, clank; I felt like Marley’s ghost—and went through them, clumsily arranging the chains so they didn’t pull at me. The first box was loaded with packaged food, as I’d thought: eight small bags of flavored potato chips; two boxes of wheat crackers and another of chicken-flavored crackers; packages of fig bars; peanuts; trail mix; energy bars; breakfast bars; beef jerky; single-serving, eat-from-the-box containers of dry cereal—Weetabix, the British version of shredded wheat—tapioca; vanilla pudding; dehydrated soup; “snack packs” of tuna paste and crackers, chicken paste and crackers, and cheese and crackers; peanut butter; blackberry jam; and a heap of resealable bags of pretzels, raisins, dates, molasses-coated popcorn, and mixed dried fruits. There were two dozen single-serving soft plastic bottles of various juice drinks as well. Maybe a week’s supply of food altogether. Nothing that would create any garbage besides the packaging materials. All in all, a fast-food junkie’s idea of health food and a whole lot more appetizing than my Turkish diet had been. I wasn’t hungry, but I opened up one of the packages of fig bars to chew on while I investigated the second carton.
This one held supplies. There were plastic-coated cardboard cups, bowls, and eating utensils, a wrapped bar of Camay soap, and two rolls of toilet paper, but not just any toilet paper—these were from England: “Aqua-Pure garden-scented soft toilet rolls, specially formulated for chemical toilets. Positively will not chafe or block waste valves.” Excellent. I’d hate having my waste valves blocked. It felt good to smile. Whatever I’d been expecting, it didn’t include garden-scented toilet paper. Some consideration for my comfort had gone into this.
No, that wasn’t accurate. It had been Baldursson they’d been expecting, not me. Which brought up the question of the GlobalSeas CEO again. There was no way to tell what his condition was. According to the witnesses, he’d been wounded, perhaps seriously. For all I knew, he was dead. Or in another location. Or, for that matter, in the next room, in a nice little tent of his own, with his own supply of garden-scented toilet paper.
My best guess: Baldur Baldursson was dead, fatally shot during the shootout. And that meant—if they had truly let Lori go—that I was now their one and only meal ticket. I shook my head to try to make myself stop thinking about whether or not they’d released her or not—what good did it do?—but of course I couldn’t help it. It was a worry that hadn’t been out of my mind for one second since I’d first awakened on the cot. I had to figure out a way to find out for sure. That was something else I would work on. What could I come up with to trade for confirmation of her freedom?
I uncapped one of the water jugs and lifted it to my mouth, then changed my mind, unwrapped a paper cup, and poured the water into it. Stay civilized. You have cups; use them. Sipping and munching, hunched on the edge of the cot, I thought about my situation. They’d chosen the supplies carefully, with more than convenience in mind. Unless I was missing something, there was nothing that could be turned into a weapon. Maybe some trained Special Forces type could fashion something deadly from one of the plastic-coated paper “sporks”—those combination utensils that try to function as both a spoon and a fork but don’t do too well at either (the bowl’s too shallow for soup, the tines are too short for meat)—but I sure couldn’t come up with anything. And there weren’t any other utensils. No knives, no forks, no can opener. The chicken and tuna containers were plastic, with pull-off plastic lids. The peanut butter and jelly were in plastic squeeze-containers, and the rest of the packaging was all paper. Perhaps you could make a dagger from a plastic tuna fish lid? Better yet, mold a fake Glock 9-mm out of a couple of packages of fig bars held together with molasses?
The tent itself didn’t offer much in the way of escape possibilities either. Fabric and rubber flooring. The entrance had an internal mesh curtain that had been tied to one side. The covering flap itself was secured by a plastic zipper. I could see that it had originally had a pull on either side, but the one that opened it from the inside had been removed. I couldn’t see any way of getting the flap open from in here; not without making any noise, at any rate. And with the supporting poles and cables outside, there was nothing but fabric within, nothing to fashion into a weapon.
There was the metal bed frame—a piece of it could serve as a club or a spear or a knife—but trying to twist or bend or pull the steel to pieces without alerting the guards would be impossible. Probably impossible even with alerting the guards. The metal links that held the canvas mattress support? No, they were as thick as the links on the chains. What about the metal eyelets that prevented the canvas from tearing? Could I get them off? Possibly, but on closer examination they turned out to be plastic, and even if they’d been metal, what exactly would I have done with them?
The plastic pull handle on the chemical toilet was a possibility, but I knew I was kidding myself. There were at least three of them out there, and I knew they had guns. I was a reasonably fit thirty-seven-year-old, but thirty-seven was thirty-seven, and I was tied to a bed, with only one usable arm and leg. If I thought I was going to take out three armed people with a plastic toilet handle, I was dreaming. Any escape plans would have to be put on hold until I learned more about their ways and about the entire setup here.
Finishing the fig bars, I tossed the wrapper into the garbage pail, refilled the cup with water, and continued to explore. I was feeling a bit more chipper. As these things went, it really wasn’t bad. If I refused to let it get to me, there was no reason—no tangible reason—I couldn’t stick it out here until something developed, one way or another. The tent was big, with room enough to stand up straight along the whole length of the center ridge. Not the kind of place I’d choose to live in, but spacious enough. And if my catnap idea failed and I did suffer nighttime panic attacks, which my gut was already telling me I would, well, too bad—that was just the way it would have to be. But I’d keep them to myself. No more “shows” for the VBJ. Besides (I tried to convince myself), when the panic attacks hit they would give me a fair chance to try out Zeta’s “self-limiting” mantra and her advice on focusing on the feelings. It couldn’t hurt to try, and maybe (but I didn’t think so) they might help. One way or another, I told myself, I’d tough it out. One day, one night, at a time.
Of course, it was one thing to be stoic about it now, when I was rational and tranquil. When the attacks came, it would be a different thing. In any case, it did no good to obsess about them now. According to Zeta, no one had ever died from a panic attack, and, for the moment, I was willing to make myself believe it.
I wished, though, that she’d been more definitive about whether anyone had ever gone stark, raving mad from one.
When it came to my physical safety, I couldn’t see much reason for serious worry, at least for a while, other than the enjoyment Stig obviously got out of beating on me. What I’d said to Ellert about Baldursson was even truer for me: There was no percentage in killing me. With me dead—assuming Baldursson was no longer alive—they’d have no chips to play. The game would be over and they would have lost. But it also worked the othe
r way around. If they lost—if, say, the police began to get close—then I became a liability; they were safer with me dead.
When you’re a lone, isolated captive, it gets hard to be certain of anything, but I really believed it wouldn’t come to that. The Odysseus Institute would surely come through with the money for my ransom. When I’d been asked the question on the telephone, I’d answered, “Yes” without stopping to think about it. But now that I did, I knew that good old Wally would come through for me with flying colors.
After all, he could never stand the marketing fallout that would come from one of his own people getting himself abducted on the job and murdered.
And with Julian Minor doing the negotiating, I was in good hands, none better. Julian had a perfect record. In more than twenty kidnap cases, he had never once lost a hostage. Unfortunately for me, however, part of his competence lay in his maddeningly deliberate approach. Julian was not the man you wanted when you were in a hurry. If I remembered right, he had never taken less than a week to wrap up a kidnap situation, and five or six weeks was more like it. Could I last five weeks, chained up and confined like this, without coming out at the other end, drooling and bug-eyed? Could I last five days? It looked as if I was going to find out.
“Bryan Bennett.”
It was Gullveig’s voice. She had unzipped the top of the entry flap and was looking in at me.
“Yes?”
“I have good news for you. It’s been decided. You can have your pills.”
My knee joints seemed to come unhinged. I sat heavily on the cot. “Thank you,” I said thickly. I was close to weeping. The intensity of the relief shocked me. I realized that I hadn’t let myself absorb until this moment how filled with dread I was over the prospect of an attack, of multiple attacks. I’d been pushing it below the surface of my mind and lying to myself with that catnap nonsense. How long could that have worked before I fell wholly asleep? One night? Two, maybe? Ridiculous. But now, with no groveling or begging from me (and that, I knew to my deep shame, would have been only a matter of time), I would have those inestimably precious little orange ovals.
“But only one a day, one at a time,” Gullveig said. “We hand it to you, and we watch you swallow it. We don’t want you saving them up. When do you take it? Morning? Night?”
“I—” With an effort I checked myself; I’d been going to plead for two. “Night,” I said. That was the crucial time; that was when my guard was down and the always-prowling, always-probing beast inside my head was most likely to find me.
“All right, we’ll come by with one later.”
“When?”
“In three or four hours. Six o’clock.” The flap closed, and I heard the whisper of the zipper and then the swish of her socks on the floor as she shuffled away.
Oho, another little bonus. She’d slipped up there at the end. Watch or no watch, I now had at least a rough idea of the time: midafternoon. One more little tie to outside reality, one less uncertainty to leave me unanchored. I let my head sink back on the cot and closed my eyes. I was insanely, ridiculously grateful but tried not to show it or even to feel it. I knew all about the Stockholm syndrome, and I wasn’t about to fall in love with my captors because they showed me a kindness.
Certainly not on the first day.
Chapter 23
They didn’t come back with the pills. Not in three hours, not in four hours, not in ten hours. They didn’t come back at all that day. I wasn’t as dismayed by this as you might expect, because I’d done some thinking after Gullveig left, and among the things I’d reluctantly concluded was that they wouldn’t follow through. In fact, I’d have been surprised if they had.
Experienced kidnappers—Asian or Latin American drug lords, say, or Mexican or South American kidnap rings (never before, to my knowledge, had the phrase been used for environmental activists in Iceland)—understand that the first few days of captivity are crucial to establishing the captive’s docility and cooperation. And one of the ways to establish these is to waste no time demoralizing him. And one of the many ways to demoralize him is to get his hopes up, then dash them. Then do it again. And again. That, I thought, was what this pill thing was about. My pathetic attempt at escape had marked me as “difficult,” and they were now in the process of showing me the error of my ways.
All things considered, I had little to complain about. There were means of demoralization that were far more drastic: torture, sensory deprivation, starvation, constant loud noise (usually, for reasons that made perfect sense to me, rock music). I was grateful that these people weren’t taking any of those paths; not yet, anyway. But it looked as if I were back to tackling the damn panic attacks on my own.
After Gullveig left, I went back to reconnoitering. And I hatched a few fantastic new escape plans (escape fantasies would be closer to the truth), I planned how I would respond to a thousand different situations that might arise, and I busied myself leaving clues for the police to find afterward: leaving my fingerprints all over the place, getting tent material under my fingernails, and going through three of the plastic-covered spork handles to press my initials into the rubber flooring. BB, it turns out, is a particularly unsuitable set of initials for this purpose. Except for those two vertical lines, it’s nothing but curves.
I also had another meal. What I seemed to be hungry for was breakfast—maybe a couple of boxes of the Weetabix with milk and dried fruit—but I figured it was evening or late afternoon, not morning, and I knew it was best to keep as near to my normal daily regimen as I could. Best, too, to eat in an enlightened fashion, course by course. It was too easy to slip into random grazing, grabbing whatever appealed at the moment (such as Weetabix). Therefore, having seated myself on the edge of the cot and using the closed lid of the chemical toilet as a table, I repasted on hors d’oeuvres (cheese and crackers), appetizer (dried lima bean soup diluted with water from one of the jugs, drunk cold from a cup), entrée (two packets of beef jerky), and dessert (dried mixed fruit). The beverage au choix was apple juice, drunk from a carton with the straw that came with it.
The ambience wasn’t all it might have been, but the meal was substantial enough and not all that bad. I could live with this. The food lifted my spirits enough so that I banged on the toilet lid with my fist and yelled, “Mes compliments au chef!” through the tent walls. There was no reply, and my little excursion into hilarity quickly subsided. Night was surely coming on. Panic time.
One bright spot shortly thereafter was the realization that I could tell day from night. The tent fabric was opaque, but a little light managed to filter in around the edges of the flap that covered the window, which was directly in line with the outside window. At some point the light had gone from the gray-blue color of daylight to the yellowwhite of incandescent-bulb lighting.
This discovery was heartening, but the moment I realized that night had come I began imagining that I could feel the damn panic attack building, waiting for me to let down my guard and fall asleep. I recited poetry to myself, and I made up songs and limericks. I’d been refused a pen or pencil (I would have made a deck of playing cards from the cereal cartons) so I read aloud whatever I could find in English: fig bar ingredients (“Organic barley flour, organic sugar, organic fig paste”), Ivory soap wrappers (“It Floats! 99% Pure!”), toilet waste-disposal instructions (you don’t want to know).
And for a while it worked. But deep into what I thought was the middle of the night, I was sitting on the edge of the cot, hunched and miserable, still fighting off sleep, when a sudden jerk of my chin made me realize I was losing the battle. I stood up and walked in place and did knee bends and stretches. I dug my fingernails into my palms and bit my cheeks and my already painful lip. But it was only a question of time.
Usually, panic attacks would hit me without warning. One second I’d be peacefully sleeping, and the next I’d be sitting up rigidly, eyes popping, raving and panting. But once in a while, instead I’d be nudged awake with the illusion that some tiny crea
ture—a mouse, a little bird, maybe even an insect—was inside my skull, gently tugging at the seams of my mind, and that the stitches were beginning, one by one, to come undone. That’s the way it happened this time. It wasn’t really that awful a feeling in itself, but it was an infallible indication that an attack was on its way. A Xanax could head it off at the start, so that it didn’t develop into a full-fledged attack, but I didn’t have a Xanax, and I was determined not to amuse them by pleading for one. I know I should have sat up (when had I lain down?) and tried to ward it off somehow, but it was too late; all I could do was curl up on the cot with a whimper and shut my eyes and wait for it.
And then there it was. I was a terrified five-year-old, strangling in my horrible dungeon-cave, the cold, gritty metal of the neck clamp choking off my air. I felt the wretched dankness, smelled the foul bucket in the corner, but as always this nightmare world, convincing as it was, lasted only a second or two, falling to pieces when I reached up to claw at the collar and found nothing there. I knew at once where I was and who I was and how old I was.
But by then—also, as always—it didn’t make any difference. Did the fact that I found myself actually a captive again, chained up in a tent, make it worse than it would have been at home? Not really. A panic attack, once begun, runs on its own steam, as independent of reality as it is of whatever might have brought it on, and there is no reasoning it away or willing it away. As Zeta had explained, once it starts, the all-emotion, zero-intellect limbic system is running the show, and it’s too late for the sane, sensible cortex to get in on the act.