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He hasn’t told Elina and Chal that he’s leaving. He hasn’t told anyone, because anyone he tells will try to talk him out of it or, at the very least, try to discover where he’s going. It’s crucial that no one knows that.
He pulls the money from his wallet and flashes it before Jase. Like everywhere else in the world, money talks.
Their first session begins a few minutes later. He allows Jase full creative expression.
“Where do you want to start?”
“Start at the top and work your way down,” Lev tells him. Then he leans back in the chair and closes his eyes, mentally preparing himself for the ordeal to come. . . .
43 • Risa
Risa wakes to the breathy drone of some machine—a hiss that’s both muffled and loud at once. She’s on a king-size bed in a bedroom finished in polished redwood and brass. She’s dizzy. Queasy. She feels as if the bed itself is shifting beneath her but she knows it’s only the tranqs.
“Take your time,” says an unfamiliar male voice. “You’ve been tranq’d eight or nine times in succession. It will take you longer than usual to recover. Had it been me, I would have done it differently. I would have made it easier on you.”
The man speaks with a pearly lilt and an Eastern European accent. Russian perhaps. No, not quite, but something close.
As her eyes begin to focus, she sees him standing across the room, adjusting his hair in a full-length mirror. Slender, dark hair, well dressed. Risa pulls her knees up protectively, wondering what has transpired during her lapse of consciousness.
He glances over at her, and reading her body language, he chuckles.
“Do not worry,” he says. “No one has harmed you while you slept off the tranquilizers.”
Her head feels full of foam—fizz with no substance. She can only ask the obvious question. “Where am I?”
“Lady Lucrezia,” he answers. “My harvest camp.”
She has enough of the pieces now to pull at least some of it together. The man at the antique shop was a parts pirate, and she is now in the hands of a black marketer. The parts pirate killed Jack—whom Risa promised she’d protect—whom she put directly in harm’s way. And what of Sonia?
“I’m in a harvest camp . . . ,” she repeats, hoping to get more out of him.
“Yes, you and your friend Connor.”
She was not expecting to hear that. She shakes her head, not wanting to believe it. “You’re lying! Connor wasn’t there!”
Her captor looks at her curiously. “No? I thought you were captured together. But then, Nelson didn’t explain the specific circumstances when he left you both with me.”
Nelson? Not the same Nelson . . . But as she thinks of the parts pirate, she realizes that she knew that face—or at least half of it. Suddenly the entire room s
eems to heave, moving one way while Risa’s stomach moves another. Without warning she’s retching over the edge of the bed onto the floor.
The foreigner sits beside her, gently rubbing her back, and she doesn’t even have the strength to recoil from him. “My name is Divan, and no harm will come to you while you’re in my care.” He gives her club soda to sip from a minibar beside the bed. “So much to take in. No surprise there are things that can’t be held down.” He leaves her with the club soda. “I’ll have someone come and clean it up, not to worry. In the meantime, I have business to attend to. Sleep, Risa. We’ll talk again when you’re up to it.”
He goes to the door, but turns back just before he exits. “If you feel ill again, I find that looking out of a window helps.”
Once he’s gone, Risa moves across the bed, and reaches for a curtain. Pulling it back reveals a window, but not the sort she was expecting. It’s an oval window, and beyond it clouds. Nothing but clouds.
44 • The Lady Lucrezia
Simply put, the Antonov AN-225 Mriya is the largest flying object ever built. The six engines of the massive cargo jet boast more horsepower than Napoleon’s entire cavalry, and when people talk of moving mountains, this is the plane that could do it. Only two of them were ever built. The first is in a Ukrainian air museum. The second is owned by wealthy Chechen entrepreneur Divan Umarov. Currently he is in negotiations to acquire the other one.
From the outside it looks like a 747 with glandular problems, but standing inside the jet’s cavernous cargo hold can be a religious experience, because it rises around you with the breathtaking drama of a cathedral, but can get about eight miles closer to heaven.
The interior of the Lady Lucrezia, as Divan christened her, bears no resemblance to its original hollow shell, however. It was meticulously redesigned to be both a lavish residence as well as a fully functioning harvest camp, landing only to take on fuel and fresh Unwinds from Divan’s international network of parts pirates, as well as to offload the various and sundry products of unwinding, worth so much more than the kids themselves.
Lately, he’s spent more time airborne. Considering the ruthlessness of his enemies, it’s safer to stay mobile as much as possible, and the current cargo, rare as to be almost priceless, requires his personal attention. It is a feather in his cap that he caught Connor Lassiter before the American Juvenile Authority or the despicable Dah Zey. He will remain on board, closely overseeing his business until such time as Connor Lassiter is sold at auction and his parts distributed to satisfied customers.
45 • Risa
