by Aaron Elkins
I believed it, but believing it didn’t make any difference either. I was in its grip and there was no way out. In seconds, I was on my feet beside the cot, panting and crazy, and as absolutely certain as always that there was no way back to sanity. But eventually Zeta’s endorphins kicked in and did their job, the amygdala and the hippocampus slunk grumbling back to their primitive cave, and I settled back on the cot, spent and sweating, but back in my real world, such as it was. I sighed with relief. Being the chained-up prisoner of a crazy eco-terrorist group was a walk in the park compared to living out my life in the hellish place I’d just been.
My last thoughts, before I drifted off, were good ones. I was pleased—and a little surprised, if you want the truth—at having actually found the resolve to keep the whole episode to myself instead of giving in to the need to bawl and moan and all the dismal, showy rest of it. Was it possible that trying to focus on the feelings, rather than running from them or simply giving in to them, had actually helped? Maybe so. And something else, another first: I didn’t feel sorry for myself—well, only a little—instead, I was angry with myself, ticked off at being such easy, pusillanimous, self-pitying prey to things that weren’t real. Zeta had given me some tools to fight them, and by God, I would use them. Implosion therapy, here I come.
As if I had any choice.
ONCE a panic attack had worn itself out, I would generally plummet into sleep the way a stone drops into a well. It was no different in the tent, even chained to the cot. I slept like a corpse, so that it was only reluctantly that I floundered to the realization that someone was pulling on my ankle. I hadn’t heard anybody come in.
“What, what do you want?” I mumbled irritably into the thin mattress. I tried to jerk my foot away.
“Come on, hurry up, stand up.”
“I don’t . . . what’s—?”
There were two of them again, Gullveig and Stig, and between them they pulled me roughly to my feet, snagging the handcuff on the corner of the bed frame and scraping my wrist, drawing blood. Even then I was only half-awake.
“Ow. What time is it, anyway?”
“Shut up. Get on the floor. On your stomach.”
When I was too slow to suit them, Stig shoved me down by the back of my neck. Once I was sprawled on the floor they lifted the mattress and looked under it, then began to pat me down.
I was more annoyed than frightened. “What are you looking for? Where do you suppose I’d get any—?”
Stig grabbed me by the jaw—fingers and thumb squeezing my cheeks—to pull my head around. “I’m not going to tell you again. Keep your mouth shut and stay down.” For emphasis he squeezed harder, putting a twist into it and bearing down from the shoulder.
I couldn’t help my eyes tearing up at the pain, but that’s all the satisfaction I was going to give him. “To hell with you,” I mumbled, to get in the last word. But I stayed down.
They poked in the cartons and the garbage pail, and even lifted the lid of the toilet to look inside. After a while, without saying anything more, they left. I stood up, got one of the blankets to cover myself with—even getting a simple blanket spread out over me was a hassle with the damn chains—and went back to sleep, grumbling to myself.
They hadn’t even mentioned the Xanax. “Who cares, I don’t give a damn,” I flung after them in a last game mutter. I almost believed it too.
I had the impression I’d slept for no more than another few minutes before they were tugging at me again. This time it was my shoulder.
“Wake up. We need to move you. You have to get ready.” It was my buddy Stig.
I shook off the hand and pushed myself up to a sitting position with my legs on the floor. My mind seemed more rested now, so maybe it had been longer than a few minutes. “Why? What’s happened?”
“Get yourself ready, pig. I’m not going to tell you again.”
I almost laughed. “Ready? What am I supposed to do to get ready?”
“Put on your shoes. Put on your coat.” He pointed to where they’d been brought back and thrown on the floor. “Use the toilet. You’re not going to get another chance for a long time.”
I shook the handcuff chain. “What about this? How am I supposed to go anywhere chained to a bed? How am I supposed to get into a coat chained to a bed?”
“All right, then, forget the coat.” He motioned to Gullveig to pick it up.
“Where are we going? Are the police—?”
My shoulder was gripped again and twisted hard. This guy was definitely starting to get on my nerves. “What is it with you?” he snarled. “Can’t you just do what you’re told without arguing for once? I don’t have time for this. If you give us trouble, I’ll kill you myself, I swear to God. I’m already sick of you.”
BUT ten minutes came and went, and no one came back. An hour went by, maybe more, with nothing happening except some occasional rustling or quiet laughter or bits of unintelligible conversation from the other side of the tent wall. Two hours. “What the hell is going on?” I yelled. “Are we going someplace or aren’t we?”
But that was just to let off steam. This was just another part of the demoralization process, calculated to intimidate me and knock down whatever illusions of self-determination I might still hold. They wanted me to realize, not only intellectually, but at gut level, that I was totally dependent on their whims—and, just as important, to make me understand that they were whims, capricious and arbitrary. They could decide to let me have the pills, and they could un-decide to let me have the pills, they could interrupt my sleep whenever they felt like it, and they could alert me to changes and crises that would never materialize. And they were under no obligation to give reasons or even to have reasons for any of it.
After another hour, Gullveig came in and collected the shoes. No explanation.
Anytime they felt like it, I was to understand, they could decide to beat me, or starve me, or take away my toilet and make me defecate on the floor. They were gods, and I got nothing, good or bad, except as they cared to dispense. And with no one to talk to but them, and no information coming in from the outside, my apprehensions and selfdoubts would naturally chip away at my resolve and firmness of mind and make me more easily controlled.
That was the theory. I didn’t think that either Stig or Gullveig had the sophistication to do this on their own, which meant that the other one, the man who’d stopped Stig from pounding my face to jelly, was calling the shots, all right. Either he was the man in charge and the other two were hirelings, or—and this was a new thought—he was the hireling, and he had been hired to direct the whole operation.
And I knew of only one person in the world who that was likely to be: the shadowy, half-mythical figure known as Paris.
Was it possible?
Chapter 24
They were sitting in Detective Chief Inspector Ellert Ragnarsson’s unadorned, 1960s-style office with its stained acoustic-tile ceiling and fusty tobacco odor, over a tray that held breakfast cookies with coffee for Lori and Ellert and tea for Julian. It was nine o’clock in the morning, and they had met to discuss the telephone call that Julian had gotten half an hour ago, shortly after Morgunblaðið, carrying the ad, had hit the streets.
Julian had already told them about his brief conversation with a female caller from the VBJ, in which the $850,000 offer had been refused, as expected, and in which Julian had demanded the answers to three proof-of-life questions (gotten earlier from Lori) before he proceeded any further. The kidnapper, Julian said, had hung up on him, which had frightened Lori, but Julian assured her that this was standard operating procedure and nothing to worry about. He expected another call, probably not until the next day, in which at least some of the answers would be provided, and they would move on to the next step in the bargaining process. This was simply the way it worked, and it was for the best, he had assured her.
“I know that,” she said uneasily. “It’s just that . . .” And as unexpectedly as before, hot tears had filled her
eyes and spilled down her cheeks. She groped in her bag for a tissue and wiped them angrily away. “It’s so hard to sit and wait, to leave everything up to them, to be doing nothing.”
“Not quite nothing,” Ragnarsson said. “I’ve had my people out in the coffeehouses, talking to our informants—the coffeehouses, that’s where information is to be found in Iceland—and I’m reasonably sure we know who the people are who are holding your husband—and Baldursson, if he’s still alive.”
“Well, who?” Julian asked, when Ragnarsson just sat there looking pleased with himself.
Ragnarsson put down the pipe and clasped his hands on the desk. “We believe there are three of them: Magnus Halldórsson, a one-time radical professor at the university; Stig Trygvasson, one of his students; and a young woman, Dagnyár Eyjólfsdóttir, who goes by the name of Gullveig. All have been active in the VBJ from the beginning.”
“That’s quick work,” Julian said. “Congratulations.”
Ragnarsson accepted the compliment with a nod. “And now we’re out talking to relatives and associates of these three, in hopes of turning up a lead as to where they might be holding Bryan.” He turned to Lori, who was silently chewing at her lower lip. “Is there something you want to say?”
“I guess so, yes,” she said hesitantly. “It’s only . . . well, Bryan once told me that most of the hostage deaths that do occur happen not while they’re being held, but in shootouts with the police. That scares me. I mean, if you do find out where they are, and . . . and . . .”
He smiled his reassurance. “Don’t worry, we would not go in with guns blazing, if that what worries you. We are not cowboys. If we should discover where they are, the first person I would call would be Julian. I would be inclined to follow his lead at that point.”
“And so would I,” Lori said, clearly relieved, reaching for her cup. “Whatever Julian says has my approval.”
“Oh, that’s fine for the two of you,” Julian said, “but to whom do I pass the buck?”
They all smiled, but then the frown was creasing her forehead again. “Inspector . . . Ellert . . . those three people you mentioned—they’re all Icelanders?”
“All Icelanders,” Ragnarsson agreed.
“Then there have to be more than three of them. The man who talked with me and asked about Bryan spoke perfect English, American English, without any accent at all.”
“Lori, we all learn English in school, at the same time we learn Icelandic and Danish,” the chief inspector said kindly. “Most of us don’t have accents.”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure I can tell the difference.”
He smiled. “Oh? And what if you didn’t already know I was an Icelander? Let’s say you spoke to me on the phone, in English. Could you tell I wasn’t an American?”
“Definitely.”
“Definitely,” Julian chimed in.
“Mmp,” said Ragnarsson. Jamming the pipe back into his mouth, he went to work tamping down the tobacco.
“Sorry,” Lori said, with her own charming smile. “But it is true, Ellert. And the other ones—the three that actually kidnapped us—they all had accents like yours. Only that one didn’t.”
It was Minor who responded. “So you’re saying there was an American with them?”
“Yes. Well, maybe a Canadian. And he . . . I had the impression he was the one in authority.”
“And you told me he knew who Bryan was, isn’t that so?”
“That’s right.”
“Ah.”
“What are you thinking, Julian?” Ragnarsson asked, putting a wooden match to the tobacco and sucking in to get it going.
“What I’m thinking is that this has been rather a strange case from the beginning, with many unusual elements. And I’m thinking that if we put it all together, it suggests that we are now dealing with a very seasoned, knowledgeable craftsman, indeed.”
“Craftsman?” said a scowling Ragnarsson, from within billows of fragrant smoke. “Are we back to this professional kidnapper idea of yours, then?”
Julian nodded the way a professor does when a student comes up with the right answer after sufficient prodding. “Have either of you ever heard of a man called Paris?”
“No,” said Ragnarsson.
“I don’t think so,” said Lori.
“Then perhaps I’d better tell you a little about him,” Julian said.
Chapter 25
Throughout the rest of that day my “orientation” continued. I was told I was about to be drugged again and loaded into the trunk of a car that would be shipped to Germany. It didn’t happen. I was told, with considerable jubilation, that the ransom had been agreed to and I was about to be released. It didn’t happen. “There may be trouble,” they explained, this time with ominous overtones. “They say they don’t have the money. You better hope they find it. The deadline’s today.” At one point the entrance flap was tied out of the way and I was blindfolded with an elastic bandage and told to sit on the cot facing the opening for “observation.” That lasted about an hour, perhaps two. Whether anybody had observed me I had no way of knowing.
“All right, can I take it off now?” I’d called when I couldn’t sit still any longer.
There was no reply.
“To hell with you, I’m taking it off,” I declared. When I tore it off, I found myself alone in the tent, the entrance flap closed. A little later, Gullveig came in to get the bandage. No explanation, no lecture, no comment at all.
Through it all, I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of complaining. I simply did what I was told without resistance or protest. This was what I’d expected, and simply knowing what they were trying to do gave me an edge most prisoners didn’t have. My passivity went deeper than that, though. As my time in the tent passed, I’d fallen more and more deeply into a listless but not unpleasant apathy, so much so that I’d begun to wonder if my food had been drugged. I resolved to stay away from containers that didn’t have tamperproof seals. No more peanut butter, no more blackberry jam. The peanut butter would be sorely missed; I’d had it on white bread for breakfast, along with a container of applesauce and a box of the Weetabix.
Or maybe, all things considered, I was better off staying drugged, if drugged I was. I wasn’t unhappy—well, I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t devastated, either, not the way I’d always imagined I would be if this ever happened to me again. And my mind seemed all right. I could think lucidly enough. I understood my situation perfectly. I just didn’t care. I felt removed from myself, observing my own feelings and activities without living them, like a curious but dispassionate researcher observing a white rat in a maze. Isn’t this an interesting reaction? Isn’t that an interesting response?
This is classic isolation-cell-prisoner behavior: the perception that you’re not you anymore, and don’t really have much in common with the body that’s sharing your quarters. To counteract it, I knew that I ought to be following the advice I’d given the trainees: keep my mind active; devise more clues to give the police afterward; plan escapes; and, most important, establish some control over my circumstances. But that, it seemed to me, could wait. I was tired and traumatized, and I could afford to relax, to float, for one more day.
But there was one piece of my own counsel that I made myself follow, and that was to begin an exercise program. As planned, I waited until I began to feel hungry. At that point I dragged myself up off the cot, then got down on the floor beside it, arranged the chains so they didn’t interfere, and went through two dozen push-ups and twenty sit-ups. I was puffing a little by the last few sit-ups, but I felt good anyway, my muscles agreeably achy. Then I ran in place, counting off eight hundred steps by twos, the equivalent of half a mile, rattling the damn shackles even more than necessary, so they’d know I was taking care of myself and not sitting around moping.
Once done, I flopped back onto the cot, out of breath and surprisingly exhausted. At home I was a jogger, generally going three miles without getting this fatigued. My appetite was
gone too. The chains had made running much harder. Not only were they heavy and clumsy, but they’d chafed my ankle, even through my socks and pant leg. And I’d worked up a sweat, so that every crease and hollow of my body felt greasy. Keeping myself and my clothes clean was going to be a chore, and not just on account of the chain. There was soap, yes, but no basin, no warm water. Just the gallon jugs. And paper towels. There was no toothbrush, no toothpaste, no razor.
If my estimate of the time was correct, it was now Saturday evening, the end of my second full day of captivity. It had been almost three full days since I’d last shaved, on Thursday morning. Or washed anything but my hands or brushed my teeth or changed my underwear or seen myself in a mirror. When I ran my hand over my face, my cheek had a startlingly unfamiliar feel to it, not only bristly, but hard and scaly, as if I were touching the skin of a stranger. Suddenly curious to see myself, I shambled over to the toilet, raised the lid, and, kneeling, leaned over to look for my reflection in the chemical-blue water in the bowl.
It was clearer than I expected, and worse. “Oh Lord,” I said aloud, appalled.
I looked like a hundred men I’d seen in pictures; the shocking photographs that the Red Brigades or the Red Army Faction or Shining Path would release after a kidnapping, the one in which the cowed, stunned prisoner would have some Marxist slogan in his hands or hung around his neck. I was gaunt and sunken-eyed, with wild hair, and lips that looked black in the reflection. My cheeks were deeply shadowed with stubble that seemed to run almost up to my eyes. The split in my lip was crusted, and the grimy collar of my shirt spotted with blood. I looked like a demented old street bum. And I hadn’t been here two full days yet.
You’re filthy, I said to myself. You must smell. And you’re on your knees looking at your face in a toilet bowl—off of which you then intend to eat.