Page 37 of Omega’s Fealty

“Yes, Highness.”

“Where is he?”

The man in the gray suit looks at the American. The American looks back at him. A look is exchanged between the two of them.

“He has been dealt with, Your Highness,” the man in the gray suit says. He puts a hand under my elbow, through the blanket, careful not to touch skin. “You do not need to think about him again. He cannot hurt you now.”

10. Roan

The cold hits me at the top of the ladder and I stand there a second and breathe it. All I can smell is diesel and the river. It’s clean, after the box. Nothing in it but weather.

Aurelio’s scent is still on my clothes and that makes me feel better. I said only five minutes but it feels too long already. I’ve heard about this, the post-claiming period. We’re going to want to be practically welded to each other for the next weeks.

Behind me, the hatch is a small yellow square spilling light into the early morning darkness.

Five minutes.

I go.

The deck is slick with frost and I take it slow, boots flat, hand on the rail. The gangway groans under me the way it always does. Then gravel, and I am on land for the first time in days.

The lot is the same. Dead trucks. The scrap pile. The one streetlight buzzing at the far end with my car sitting under the edge of its light where I left it, sagging a little on the back left like it always does. Nothing has changed. That should make me feel better and it doesn’t.

I don’t take the straight line.

I’ve always been a paranoid son of a bitch. Some of that is my upbringing but I suspect that even if I’d been the one in the hothouse, I’d be the same.

I don’t like risks. Risks get you killed. Risks will get Aurelio killed, even worse. I’m under no illusions that someone might be watching.

I go around the scrap pile and come at the car from the dark side, stopping at the tailgate of the last truck. I stand still, listening. There’s water slapping the hull. The streetlight. Traffic a long way off on the bridge. Nothing else.

I cross and get down on one knee at the rear wheel. The tape is unsurprisingly where I left it.

I peel it back and the bag comes away in my hand, cold and stiff.

The phone takes a long time to wake up but finally the screen comes on.

I open the news.

I don’t listen to the breaking story at the top of the news channel. Nor do I need to read the banner.

I don’t need to. I see the picture at the top of it and everything in me goes quiet.

It’s the river. It’s this river. It’s this stretch of it, shot from the far bank with a long lens, the barges in a line and the crane behind them, and there’s a red circle drawn on it by somebody in a newsroom, and inside the red circle is the boat I am standing next to.

The time on the story is thirty seconds ago.

FBI CLOSING IN.

Under it, smaller, a second picture. A man in a balaclava, caught by a gas station camera, and under that a face that isn’t in a balaclava. Mine. It’s not a good picture. It’s five years old and off an old license.

Apparently I am a PERSON OF INTEREST.

I’m already moving. My phone in my pocket, back the way I came. Two weeks ago I would have simply run for it. But now, I have someone else I need to take with me.

I get as far as the scrap pile when I hear engines. Just engines. I drop flat onto my stomach behind the scrap.

The cars come off the road onto the gravel and fan out across the lot. The doors are opening before the cars have stopped.