The Worst Thing

For Bryan Bennett, designing hostage negotiation programs is the perfect job—as long as he doesn’t deal directly with kidnappers or their victims. Intense nightmares of his own abduction and imprisonment as a small boy still plague him thirty-some years later, and claustrophobia prevents him from attempting to travel.

So when Bryan’s boss asks him to fly to Reykjavik to teach his corporate-level kidnapping and extortion seminar, he initially refuses. But a CEO has specifically requested Bry...