ONE
The Crepe Party
Rica ran to the airport, tears streaming down the perfect oval of her face. Ricardo had betrayed her, shattered their love like a piñata.
—Kerry-Lee Storm, The Cost of Rica #5: Blaze of the Phoenix
Coordinate points are somewhere in the middle of the Gulf of Oman. It is one minute past midnight, Friday, September 20, and therefore officially my twenty-seventh birthday. There’s no cake though, not even a candle: just me, wearing black coveralls and pacing in the empty belly of a soviet-era Ekranoplan. Other spoiled little girls might inherit real estate and paintings from their rich biological dad. Mine was a flamboyant supervillain and the former leader of a secret brotherhood of assassins. I did inherit properties all over the globe after his death—including a tacky chalet in Gstaad with a spinning bed I am never, ever having sex in—but I also became the proud owner of a Russian military hydroplane dating back to the eighties. And tonight, it is coming in handy, or so I pray.
We’ve gone entirely dark to escape detection, and there are no windows in the main cabin. The only source of light in this nearly three-hundred-feet-long steel grotto is my laptop screen, casting a faint glow on cargo nets hanging from the walls and two rows of spartan seats along the hull. I bite my nails, eyes glued to a map of the gulf onscreen. Still no signal, and my earpiece remains obstinately silent. Earlier today, March managed to extract our client and his family—pet gerbil included—from Abu Dhabi to Sur, a port city on the eastern coast of the Sultanate of Oman. Now all that’s left for us is to transport them safely to the only democracy in a thousand-mile radius: India.
Theirs is a classic tale of Emirati sponsorship gone wrong: German robotics tycoon comes to the United Arab Emirates with several million in his pockets, hoping to turn them into billions. Local sheik welcomes him with open arms, and, together, they set up a joint venture to build the next generation of fully automated crepe stands operated by cute robots. Crepes prove disappointing despite extensive R&D investments. Business relationship turns sour. Angry sheik—legally—confiscates the entire family’s passports and holds everyone hostage in Abu Dhabi until robot is able to cook a halfway decent banana-Nutella-chantilly (double sprinkles). Engineer ultimately hires a man of the shadows to escape this batter-soaked hell before it is too late.
If everything went according to plan, March sabotaged the fuel tanks of the Omani coastguards’ patrol boats after sunset, before he picked up our sorry lot of expatriates in a stealth speedboat. He should have contacted me by now. Scratch that: he should be here by now. I shoot yet another anxious glance at the Ekranoplan’s rear hatch, which remains shut. I trust him more than anyone else, but that does little to ease the nausea roiling in my stomach.
If March gets caught . . . I don’t even want to think about it. Everything we’re doing tonight is worth, at the very least, a thousand lashes and life without parole. My stare is threatening to burn a hole into my laptop screen, and I have no nails left to bite when a row of lights starts to blink red on the ceiling. Around me, the Ekranoplan comes alive. Metal creaks and shudders under my feet before a low vibration announces that the eight engines sitting on the wings of the Caspian Sea Monster have been turned up. That will not do.
I race to the front of the cabin, where a door leads up a flight of grating stairs to the cockpit. There, an old Lion and his bulldog await in the dark, drooling. I mean the dog, not the man.
“What are you doing?” I hiss. “We can’t leave now!”
From the copilot’s seat, seventy-pound Andrea dismisses me with a gruff bark, proudly flaunting his brown and white folds in a custom-made leather flight jacket designed to match his master’s—soccer patches and all. In the pilot’s seat, Jan scratches at the ponytail he never seems to comb, looking away from the dashboard’s innumerable buttons, gauges, and switches. His lips are a thin line in his craggy blond beard; the blue in his eyes has turned to a steely gray. “It’s past midnight,” he reminds me, each syllable made harsher by his faint Flemish accent.
“We wait,” I insist.
His carbon prosthetic right hand remains on the yoke, while the blunt and callused fingers of his left one resume flipping up a series of switches. “I have my orders, princess.”
“From whom? That’s my Ekranoplan.”
All I get in return is a cool, empty smile. Jan is my friend, and he was my father’s friend before that, but I fear I’m wasting my time. March told him to leave at midnight, and Jan will do just that, because they once belonged to the same brotherhood, as did Dries, the father I knew all too briefly. They were—and to some extent remain—Lions, a twenty-five-century-old secret society of assassins and mercenaries which has thrived in darkness from the birth of the Roman republic to modern-day South Africa. Theirs is a bond forged in blood, and there’s too much respect between them to leave room for any pity.
“Give him ten more minutes,” I plead, my voice thick with rising panic. “If you try to leave, I’ll have to fight you and Andrea, and I really don’t wanna have to do that.” Especially since I won’t last a second against Jan’s ham-sized fists.
A thousand creases carve a wince into the bronze leather of his face. “Island . . .”
“I seriously will.”
Jan knows I’m not lying. I’ve been to space and back with March—literally so. I’d do anything for that man. Anything. I’m not leaving until he’s safely back here with our client and his freaking gerbil.
“Ten minutes tops,” Jan concedes in a grunt. “But I shouldn’t listen to you.”
“He told you to leave with me, no matter what,” I guess softly, even as my heart swells and hammers at the confines of my ribcage. Of course, March would plot something like that behind my back. Protective, pathologically controlling: he can be a tender tyrant, sometimes.
Jan’s big frame deflates with a sigh, and he’s about to reply when Andrea jerks in his seat, as if stung by a bee. Nature never ceases to amaze: that dog realized my phone was buzzing before I even did. Jan and Andrea study me with unabashed curiosity as I plunge a feverish hand in my front pocket. My fingertips meet cool glass framed in aluminum. It makes no sense that March would call me when my earpiece is connected to an ultra-secure radio frequency, but let it be him, please . . .
My pulse peaks and crashes back just as fast when the caller ID is revealed. It’s Joy, my ex-roommate, part-time wife, and, incidentally, the other love of my life. She knows I’m supposed to be in the UAE on “business”; she wouldn’t call if it weren’t important. But I just can’t pick up right now, when the clock is ticking and I’m sick with worry for March. My cheeks flush with scathing guilt as I swipe to deny the call.
“It’s not him,” I inform Jan.
He gives a slow nod and turns back to the dashboard. The final ring and the silence that follows bring me no relief, only another wave of insidious shame as I think of all the lies I’ve told Joy over the past two years. And yet, she’s been patient; she’s given me space and pretended to buy my bullshit even when the lawyer in her could see right through me.
It’s times like these when I wish she knew everything. I could tell her I’m scared and lost at sea far from home, and she’d tell me not to worry because March can assemble an Ikea bookcase and fire eight shots in under a second. He’s the best. But life is a little more complicated than that. There’s a knot in my throat that simply won’t go away as I pocket my phone. It vibrates again. It’s a text this time. I should ignore it and focus, but I can’t help it. I take a guilty peek.