Page 46 of Omega

“Where is it all going?” I felt dizzy, sick.

“Whole world. Miami, Hanoi, Vancouver, London…everywhere.”

“You’re okay with slavery?”

Yuri swiveled his head on his thick neck, and his small dark eyes fixed on me, hard as chunks of marble. “Not my job to like or not like. My job is only to get you to boss. I like, I don’t like, no one cares. I tell boss I don’t like, you know what he does? He shoots me dead, like I shoot stupid Nico. Easy. So, I don’t like be shoot dead, I keep my words to myself, and stay alive.”

“Oh.” What else was there to say? Subtext was, he didn’t like it, but couldn’t do anything about it.

“Am I going in one of those?” I pointed at a container.

Yuri shook his head. “Nyet. You are more valuable than them. You go in one of those, you end up in a shithole in Naypyidaw, fucked fifty times a day for a handful of coins you don’t get to keep, and you stay there until you die.”

“Napyih-what?”

He actually chuckled at that. “Naypyidaw. Capital city of Myanmar. Once used to be Burma.”

“Well that doesn’t sound fun.”

He had nothing to say to that other than a grunt. He led me along a path around and between stack after stack of containers so circuitous that I couldn’t have navigated it again even if I’d been paying closer attention. Eventually we emerged at the base of the kind of crane used to build skyscrapers, the machine itself dozens of stories tall with a boom arm hundreds of feet long, a box at the top only accessible via elevator. The boom arm was in motion far above us, swiveling over our heads with a shipper container in its grasp. I ducked involuntarily as it crossed over me, even though it swung easily a hundred feet over my head. Yuri laughed.

“If it falls you die, even if you duck.” He gestured at a waiting helicopter. “This is our ride. For a prisoner, you get nice ride.”

It was a small helicopter, big enough for maybe four people plus the pilot. The door was open, revealing plush leather seats, each one empty. Yuri climbed in and held out his hand to help me up, but I ignored him and stepped in on my own, and then sat down and buckled in.

I was seated so I could see the cockpit, and I watched avidly as the pilot manipulated the controls with deft hands, skillfully lifting the helicopter off the ground without so much as a wobble. It looked hard as hell, honestly, a lot more to control and not as intuitive as an airplane. I’d picked that up easily enough, but then that was a lot simpler; one yoke, push in to descend, pull back to lift up, turn it left to bank left, right to bank right, foot pedals to pivot horizontally in either direction. Keeping all the buttons, switches, and dials straight was trickier, but not exactly difficult. The helicopter controls, however, looked a lot more involved, as you had to manipulate the craft on several axes: pitch and yaw, as well as bank, plus ascent and descent vertically, all combined with velocity.

Maybe after Harris rescued me, he’d teach me to fly choppers as well as fixed-wing aircraft.

That thought sobered me: I was operating on the assumption that Harris was coming for me—I didn’t doubt that part. I knew he’d be looking. But how could he find me? These guys had vanished me very effectively. I’d gone from a little Zodiac speedboat to a fishing boat, and from there to a helicopter. No witnesses, no records. From the helicopter I figured they’d probably take me somewhere even further afield, maybe on a private jet to the Mediterranean, or somewhere deep in the heart of South America. Either way, how could Harris hope to find me?

I’m not a crier. Never have been, never will be. But the thought of what awaited me had me choking up with fearful tears. So far I’d been left alone, but something told me that was just because I was meant for “the boss”, one Vitaly Karahalios, international crime kingpin extraordinaire. I had no doubt that whateverhehad in mind wouldn’t be at all pleasant. Rape, torture, and murder had all been suggested as possibilities for what awaited me.

I had to hold on to hope that Harris would, somehow, find me and rescue me. Preferably before anything too fucked up was done to me.

I made a new mantra: Harrisiscoming. Harrisiscoming. Harrisiscoming.

The helicopter angled inland, and after maybe twenty minutes flight time, we landed in an empty grass field beside an old twin-engine prop plane. The grassy field, I realized, was a makeshift airstrip, meaning Caracas, Venezuela still wasn’t my final destination. The fixed-wing airplane’s engines were spinning, and as I was hustled off the helicopter, the airplane’s rudder and flaps wiggled as the pilot prepared for takeoff. I tried to distract myself from my ever-present fear with mental images of flying, checking dials and flipping switches and going through the checklist—all the boring shit you have to do to get to the good stuff: soaring through the air, free, high above it all, a bird’s-eye view of the world and all its attendant troubles. I was shoved—none too gently, and with a lingering touch on my ass—up the stairs and onto the plane. There were a few metal chairs bolted to the floor up front near the door to the cockpit, but the rest of the fuselage was empty. It had clearly once been a passenger plane, but had long since been retrofitted to serve as a cargo plane, with tie-downs bolted to the walls and floors.

Yuri buckled me in, took a chair beside me, and then called out in his language. The plane rotated in place, and then I heard and felt the engines ramp up, felt the ground bumping under the wheels, and then the lurch as we left the earth, angling aggressively upward.

And then…?

More boredom. Hours and hours of absolutely nothing, not even anything to see, as the tiny round windows were too far away to show me anything except the blue sky and the occasional scrap of cloud. Hours and hours of flight, Yuri snoring beside me. I could have unbuckled and jumped out, but I didn’t have a parachute, didn’t know how to use one, and didn’t fancy my chances of surviving a fall from an airplane. And his weapon was tucked in against his body, which meant if I tried to take it, he’d wake up and I’d be in trouble. Nothing to do but wait, it seemed.

So I endured the boredom as best I could.

We landed, eventually, and Yuri woke with a start when we hit the ground. As soon as the plane was stopped, he hauled me off the airplane and into yetanotherfucking aircraft, this one another helicopter pretty much identical to the first.

I groaned out loud. “Jesus, really? More flying? This has got to be the most tedious kidnapping in the history of kidnapping.”

Yuri shot me a glance. “You would like it to be more exciting, then? I can think of ways.”

“Well, when you put it that way, maybe boring is good.”

“In your place, boring is good.”

The helicopter lifted off and we headed south over lush greenery. No one said a word. I contemplated jumping out and taking my chances in the jungle, but Yuri’s gaze flicked over to me regularly, as if to assess my inclination for just such a move. He was close enough that he’d probably be able to grab me before I even got myself unbuckled.