0004 Naked Adventure

Lana holds the guns tightly as she peers out of the top turret. She feels the plane lurch and dive, so she spreads her feet for balance.

She yells. “Plane is going over the top, inverted!”

Of course, the turret’s seat and machinery were removed. They needed the weight for fuel and their haul. She just had to hold on and use the useless top turret as a window, the guns just props, useless, and something she wished they had.

If she wasn’t so new at all this, so inexperienced, and had any clue what was going on or who the players were she would feel a little more in control. As it is, she had to trust her stepmom and sisters to guide her through the minefield of the international antiquities criminal cartels, for-profit intelligence agencies, revolutionary groups, terrorist cells, and governments under sanction that all fought for a part of the lucrative business of looting history and selling it for a profit to the world’s wealthy elite.

All of it was money laundering, as her step-aunt Lilith would say, 90% of the art trade is money laundering and artificially raising prices for worthless junk for quid-pro-pro deals, payoffs, drug sales, hush money, payoffs, and other international bribery schemes financed with taxpayer money disguised as foreign aid.

Where famous people got books deals for payoffs (of course, financed by government textbook contracts the same politicians hand the publishers), the not-so-famous had to wallow in the world of art and antiquities.

All this world was new to her. She hated it all too. She felt covered in a world full of dirty criminals and shady dealers looking to finance illegal wars, narcotics, and pay-for-play deals. Shen she was younger she bought into that entire “heroic super government agent” nonsense they pushed in movies and comic books. Fighting to protect ideals.

She knew better now.

There were no good guys. Not in this world.

The fighter tuned inverted above her and the caught a glimpse of the…woman…in the cockpit. Blonde hair. Vest. Ponytail. Their eyes met. Lana felt a sickening pang of familiarity in the pit of her stomach.

She yelled. “Woman in the cockpit! Blonde! Ponytail! Has a vest on! Wearing black or green!”

Did she know this person?