The Courier Ch. 05

Cecilia told Pedro to get in bed before going downstairs to briefly talk to Victor. Then she went to her room and got on the Internet to deal with correspondence and e-mails that had built up over the day. Unlike Maria Elena, it would be several hours before she could go to sleep, because after answering her e-mails she had to work on progress reports for her students.

----------

Victor Dukov watched Cecilia as she climbed the stairs to return to her room. He reflected that it had been four years since she and her nephew had first come to his house. She had come to live with him and his wife after having fled the United States with her boyfriend Jason. A very strange couple indeed, but it was because of them that his brother was still Prime Minister and Danubia still had an independent government. The entire country owed them a tremendous debt, so to allow her to stay in his house all that time, even if a rambunctious small boy was part of the deal, was nothing to him.

Four years...how much everything in his life had changed in just four years. Four years ago his youngest son was still living at home and his wife was still alive. They were both gone: the son working at a new customs inspection station in Rika Chorna Province, and his wife was with the Creator.

Victor took off his clothes and put on a black prayer robe. He then returned to his living room, knelt in front of a black-framed portrait of his wife, and began praying. He had lost her, and fully understood that her death was due to his own negligence.

Victor's wife had been the one person in his life who was patient enough to withstand his ill temper. She understood that he was not good at expressing himself, which frustrated him and made him seem much meaner than he really was. She gave him a family and sense of purpose, wearing herself out raising three sons as well as helping him with his business venture. She always supported him, even when it seemed his courier service was not going to succeed. For years she was indispensable, spending long hours making sure his bookkeeping was in order so he could attend to his employees and their assignments. Without her, his sons would not have grown up to be responsible adults and business would not have survived. He fully understood that.

Yes, Victor's business had expanded tremendously over the past several years, but that expansion came at a huge personal cost. His wife started having strange pains in her body, but she chose to ignore them. She had felt nauseous and faint, but she pressed on. Towards the end Victor knew that she didn't look very good, but he dismissed the thought that anything could be seriously wrong. He figured that he would take her on vacation and with some rest she'd feel better.

The vacation was supposed to be during the summer, but in April she finally went to see a doctor. At the appointment the Dukovs found out what was really going on; that she had advanced cancer and that it had spread throughout her body. There wasn't anything that could be done, because she was way beyond the point that treatment could have done her any good. By June she was dead.

It was August now, and Victor still had not come to terms with what had happened. If only he and his wife had taken better care of their bodies, seen their doctors on a regular basis, it was for sure the cancer would have been detected in time for something to be done about it. It really had been up to him to watch out for her, because she was too busy with his needs to think about her own.

----------

Victor finished his prayers and rose to his feet. For a very long time he stared at his wife's picture, unsure what to do next. He knew that eventually he would have to go to bed and face another day. He now had a total of 63 employees: couriers, clerks, salespersons, accountants, and supervisors. Those people depended on him. Cecilia and her nephew depended on him. Even his brother, the Prime Minister, depended on him. He had a grandchild that would be born within a month, so dwelling too much in guilt would do him no good. He felt responsible for what had happened to his partner in life, but now he also was responsible for the futures of so many others. How to balance all that...what should have been with what would be in the future? Really...how?

Victor walked upstairs and passed the door to the room where the Colombian girl was sleeping. The door had been left open, because as a criminal she had to sleep uncovered in an open room. The light from the hallway illuminated her attractive figure.

He stood in the doorway contemplating his new guest, wondering how long she'd be at his house. He vaguely suspected it would be more than "just the few days" that Kim had told him. The truth was that, until she could learn some Danubian, she would have to stick close to Cecilia and living with her was the only realistic option. He then realized that if the Colombian stayed longer than a few days, he really didn't mind. For some reason he found her interesting and was not in any hurry to get rid of her. Strange...he was completely unable to communicate with that girl, and yet she fascinated him...

----------

A few hours later Maria Elena woke up. At first she was totally confused. The room was unfamiliar, she was naked on an uncovered bed, and she had a metal collar around her neck. Most disconcerting was the total silence. She sat up and covered herself, trying to figure out what had happened. Surly this must be some weird dream...

She touched the collar and looked around the room. Then she felt the bruises in her bottom and the welts on her shoulders. Those hurt for real...no dream. At that point the memories of the previous day started coming back and she realized where she was. No dream...she was in a stranger's house, in a totally foreign city, where it seemed that only one other person spoke Spanish.

She touched the collar again and put her finger through the metal loop. No escape...there was no escape. She could go downstairs and even step out the front door if she wanted, but because that collar had a transmitter on it, there was no escape.

No escape. It was not only because of her collar there was no escape, it also was because she had nowhere to run. Really...no where to go. Without money and a visa there was no point in trying to go to Spain. Most certainly she did not want to be deported back to Colombia. Many of her friends had wanted to go to the United States, but for some reason she had no desire to go there, nor did she want to go anywhere else in Latin America. Her earlier thoughts of running now seemed rather silly, because even without her collar, she was trapped.

Maria Elena slipped downstairs and decided that she did indeed want to step outside. However, she propped open the front door to make sure she could get back in. The pre-dawn darkness was incredibly peaceful, because there were no sounds of traffic to disturb the quiet. No one was moving about; she was totally alone on the solitary street. There was a slight rustling of leaves in the night breeze, but that was it. The cool air seemed to caress her bare body. For the first time since her arrest, she actually was enjoying the sensation of being naked outside.

She reflected that it only had been 18 hours since she had been arrested, and yet so much had changed in that short time. She wondered what happened in Frankfurt when Flight 2298 finally arrived, and El Flaco stood by, waiting for a call from her cell phone that never came. Maria Elena guessed that he probably called Alex to confirm that a courier was indeed supposed to be on that flight. They would have spent the rest of the morning figuring out that the flight had been diverted to Danubia, that Maria Elena traveled as far as Danube City, but that she never made it back on the plane. The only question remaining would have been to determine whether she had been arrested by the Danubians or whether she had decided to not re-board the plane on her own, in hope of stealing the cocaine she was carrying and trying to sell it herself. As for the boyfriend who had been responsible for her getting into drug trafficking in the first place, Maria Elena was realistic. Undoubtedly already he was working on some other idiotic naïve girl, using his fancy car and expert Salsa dancing to seduce someone equally as stupid as herself. It was likely that he already had totally forgotten about her.

There was one change that she could be happy about. She realized that her Spokeswoman probably was right when she asserted that in Danubia, Maria Elena was totally safe from Alex and El Flaco. She would not have been so safe from them had she gone to Spain...and...

Suddenly Cecilia's words of doubt entered her mind...15,000 Euros...that was indeed a lot of money. Was it possible that El Flaco really had no intention of actually giving it to her? What if Cecilia was right? El Flaco didn't know her, so what would have prevented him from murdering her and keeping the 15,000 Euros for himself? Now that she had some time to reflect, that frightening possibility loomed in her imagination. Another scenario forced itself into her thoughts. Germany...why did they have her fly to Germany? Wouldn't Spain have been more logical? Maria Elena didn't speak any German; so in that country she would have been totally helpless...especially if they took her passport. Maybe that was what they wanted? Yes...she had heard stories about women from all over the world traveling illegally to various Western countries and ending up...

Maria Elena tried to catch her breath. She thought about Cecilia's questions, and started remembering various details in Panama City, small things that should have alerted her that she was placing herself in very grave danger. She chose to ignore those warnings, because she was so blinded by her dream of going to Spain. She realized, she now knew, that there was no chance that El Flaco simply would have paid her off and allowed her to leave Germany. No, he had something much more sinister in mind for her. A terrifying thought: had she not been arrested, had she continued on to Germany, would she even still be alive right now?

----------

Trembling with fear and badly shaken, she went back inside, closing the door behind her. She went to the bathroom and managed to calm her nerves. To distract her mind from her frightening situation, she stopped in the hallway and studied herself in a full-length mirror. She realized that her figure was quite attractive. That came as a surprise to her, because she never really had looked at herself naked in a full length mirror before. She still had tan-lines from the swimsuit that she normally wore in Colombia, but she knew those would be gone within a few days; one more detail from her previous life that was destined to disappear.

Maria Elena returned to her bed and fell back asleep. She had only been up an hour, but during that short time she clearly understood that she needed to accept what had happened. The only future for her would be a future in Danubia, because for her there were no alternatives.

The Path of her Life...as the people around her kept saying...