Page 13 of Omega’s Fealty

Thirty grand for two weeks of sitting down. I knew it was high. I’ve done hot jobs before where the cops, feds, anyone with a badge is rabid to catch anyone even half-connected with it.

But that was before the cargo was human.

Damn Sully. He knows my rule.

He must be getting a fortune for it. Once this is done, I am tempted to hunt him down and give him a punch on the nose.

Tempted. The reality isn’t worth it. Once this is done, I leave and lie low.

It helps that I know the prince is valuable. Real valuable.

They’ll want to keep him alive.

Me, less so.

When the time comes, I’m the only man outside their own crew who has seen what’s in this hold. People who steal princes don’t leave strangers walking around with that in their heads. The back half of my pay is a bullet. I’d bet the front half on it.

That’s the shape of it, near as I can see it. What I can’t see is the hunt.

How hard are the feds looking for him? Has it even been announced that he’s gone?

Maybe the media is reporting that he has missed a few appearances because of a cold or flu or whatever excuse. Or maybe his face is all over every channel along with a fat reward.

Maybe even now, the lights and sirens are about to come screaming down the road and surround me.

I need to know if they’re hunting. The hunt decides everything.

Sully took my phone in the hold. That’s standard, and I let him.

But the phone I handed over was the phone I meant to hand over.

There’s another one in the car.

Years of this work have taught me a few things, and the big one is: go in with a way out that nobody else knows about.

One of those ways is this: the night before a job, I buy a prepaid smartphone with cash, charge it, seal it in a freezer bag, and tape it up inside the rear wheel arch.

I’ve not needed to touch it before.

I wait until past two a.m. The rain has thinned to drizzle and the glow of the city across the river has gone patchy as the bars shut down.

I walk the deck once, check the coffee can of bolts at the gangway head, and stand listening in a dark corner for a long ten minutes. All I hear is water on the hull. Nothing else.

I need to know what I’m sitting on more than I need to keep rules made by people who might be planning to bury me.

I go down the gangway soft, cross the lot along the fence line, and stop twice in the dark to listen.

My car sits where I left it, out past the reach of the streetlight. The bag is where I left it too. I peel the tape, get into the driver’s seat, pull the door to without letting it latch, and hold the phone low under the dash while it wakes up.

One search. I don’t even get his whole name typed.

He is the first story on every feed in the country. PRINCE AURELIO MISSING. ABDUCTED ON AMERICAN SOIL. DAY TWO.

A file photo of him on a palace balcony in dress whites, younger doing that weird mini-wave that royalty do to stop their poor rich hands from getting too tired.

There’s footage of his hotel, a hundred cameras camped across the avenue.

I scroll, and it gets worse by the line. FBI. Homeland Security. The State Department. There’s a joint task force with its own name and its own tip line.