Omega (Alpha #3) (19 page)

“Stand up, stupid.” He grabbed my arm and hauled me to my feet. “Crazy fucking American. You only been in there three days.”
 

I stood up and brushed my knees off, unconsciously keeping them pressed together. The pen wasn’t in danger of falling out, because let’s be honest, I keep my shit tighter than a drum. Kegels, bitches. Flex those PCs. I’m like a goddamn body builder, but for my pubococcygeus muscle. But still, one worries, in this situation. As one would.
 

He led me back up to the deck of the boat, which was now swarming with activity. Men were scrambling everywhere, shirtless, sweaty, and cursing as they hauled crate after crate out of the hold and onto a platform suspended from a crane-arm, which would then swing it across from the boat to a shipping container. Each crate had ‘VK’ emblazoned on the side in huge black-painted letters. They all looked heavy, since each one required two men to lift it, although there was one really huge motherfucker with arms the size of my waist hauling them around one in each hand like bags of groceries. As Yuri led me across the deck, all work stopped.

Eyes were fixed on me.
 

Lips curled up in lecherous grins. Wrists wiped at sweaty brows.

I focused on Yuri’s back, ignored the stares, and made sure I was walking as normally as possible. Under other circumstances, I’d have relished the amount of male attention I was getting. I’d probably have swayed my hips a bit, put some bounce in my step, maybe winked and flirted.

This wasn’t a typical situation, and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t enjoy the kind of attention those particular men had in mind.

So I kept my eyes straight forward and hustled after Yuri. Of course, the shirt that was my only article of clothing was ripped open, leaving my back bare from neck to ass and, as I’ve mentioned, my choice in undergarments left my buttocks bare as the day I was born. So those big sweaty gorillas all got a free show anyway.

Good thing I worked hard to keep my ass nice and round and firm, huh?

Thank god this time there was a ramp leading from the deck down to the dock. I followed Yuri off the boat. Looking around, I realized we were in a very urban port, but I had no idea where. We walked past mammoth shipping containers stacked three and four high, forming a maze that blocked out the sun as we passed between them. The ground underfoot was damp industrial concrete, a rainbow sheen here and there from leaking oil. I heard a diesel rumble somewhere to my left, shouts, the beeping of a machine of some kind backing up, and then a container high above our heads slid away.
 

“Where are we?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Caracas,” Yuri grumbled.

“Ca-who-what?”

“Caracas. Venezuela.”

“What’s in the containers?”

“Business for big boss.” A shrug.
 

“Drugs, you mean?”

“Not only drugs. Guns also. Cars. People.”
 

I stumbled. “People?”
 

“Prostitutes. Brides. Slaves.”
 

“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 whatever
he
had 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: Harris
is
coming. Harris
is
coming. Harris
is
coming.
 

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 yet
another
fucking 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.
 

“Where are we going?” I asked, after an hour or so had passed.

“São Paulo,” Yuri muttered. “No more questions. Nearly there.”
 

Harris is coming. Harris is coming. Harris is coming.
 

A city came into view, vast and sprawling, the jungle giving way very suddenly to an urban landscape ensconced a few miles inland from the sea. God, the urban sprawl. It was dizzying. The helicopter zipped in low, only a few hundred yards above the tallest buildings, making a beeline across the city. I heard the pilot speaking—Brazilian? Portuguese? I was pretty sure they spoke Portuguese in Brazil, and São Paulo was in Brazil. Right? God, I was so ignorant of world geography. Anyway, I heard him speaking, and then the aircraft slowed as we approached a specific building, our destination. A hotel, by the looks of it, a big, fancy one, the kind that had helicopter landing pads on the roof.

The landing was gentle as a feather wafting on a breeze, the touchdown barely registering. The rotors didn’t stop or slow as Yuri unbuckled himself, threw open the door, and leapt out past me. I had myself unbuckled but he refused to let me get down on my own, grabbing me by the waist and lifting me down. The wash from the helicopter forced me to bend almost double, making a tangled nest of my already gnarled hair. Yuri grabbed my wrist and dragged me across the roof at nearly a run, through a door and into an elevator, inserting a key and twisting it.

We descended briefly, and then the doors opened.

“Ah. Miss Campari.” The voice was accented, deep as a canyon, smooth as silk. Quiet, like a predator. “Welcome.”

I saw the man who owned the voice. Only a few inches taller than me, but broad and powerfully built, he had thick wavy black hair, piercing dark eyes, weathered olive skin, and a square, granite jaw. He exuded threat and power. He wore tailored black slacks, and a dove-gray polo shirt left untucked. Barefoot. Clean-shaven.
 

Something in his eyes as he assessed me made me shiver. This man was…terrifying.

I wanted to hide behind Yuri, but he was already backing into the elevator, twisting the key, and then the doors were sliding between us, leaving me alone. I stood alone, facing Vitaly Karahalios. All but naked, and completely terrified.

He stalked over to me, flicked a loose curling tendril of hair with a fingertip, circling around me like a cat toying with a mouse. His fingertip traced down my spine where the shirt gaped open. I shivered and fought the urge to shy away. Another brief touch, this time to my shoulder. Nudging the shirt off my shoulder; the cotton slipped down to my bicep on one side, and then he nudged at the shirt on the other side, and it fell even more.
 

He circled back in front of me, hooked his finger in the collar and tugged. I let him remove the shirt, standing before him in nothing but my thong. I kept my back straight, my knees locked, my chin high.

Defiant.
 

Don’t show fear
—I knew his kind all too well.

“They brought you here like this?” he asked. “I will have to scold them. You are a guest.”
 

“I don’t feel like a guest,” I ventured.
 

“Perhaps not. Nonetheless, you should have been treated better. How was your trip here?”

I stared at him. “They threw me in a tiny room on a ship that had no windows and stank of fish. The airplane and helicopters were okay, though.”
 

“Not in a proper room?” he demanded, seeming genuinely puzzled.
 

I shook my head. “It was worse than a prison cell.”
 

“Idiots.” He withdrew a cell phone from his trouser pocket, touched a speed dial number, and put the phone to his ear. He spoke briefly in a foreign language, his voice sharp but quiet. After replacing the phone in his pocket, he bent and retrieved my shirt, handing it to me. “I will arrange proper clothing for you in a moment, after we’ve had time to acquaint ourselves. But first, I must have a word with Yuri.”