I look at him and he has a strange look in his eyes…one I haven’t seen before.
“We need to talk,” he says.
CHAPTER 20
Alice
My body is still covered in goose bumps and there’s a permanent chill up my spine as we walk down the sidewalk.
After what seems like forever, but is probably only twenty minutes, I see a delicate iron-cast railing and realize it’s separating the sidewalk from some absolutely beautiful park.
“Welcome to the Summer Garden,” he says. “Although it’s open year round.”
He holds the gate open for me and we enter.
There are numerous sculptures and the park is beautifully landscaped and maintained.
I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse. I’m starting to feel like this is one of those scary rendezvous you always see in the movies where some Russian bad guy meets someone in the park to either give them bad news or the worst kind of news…that they’re dead.
Artem motions towards a park bench and we sit down together.
Artem reaches inside his jacket pocket and hands me my passport.
“Look at this…carefully,” he says.
I open it and look at the lone stamp I have inside and the hard laminated first page which has my picture and information.
“Okay?” I say.
“Do you notice anything wrong?”
I look at it again, examining everything including the exterior. “Besides the fact that it was in your pocket and not my bag?”
“Your father was lazy,” he says.
I swallow hard. “You’re scaring me.”
“I will never harm you. You know that. But what I’m about to tell you will harm the beliefs you’ve held your entire life,” he begins.
My eyes dart around the park wondering if there’s someone else here…watching us, listening to us, plotting something…to do to me.
“Did you ever wonder why your father sent you here on a Russian passport and not an American one?”
“Because it would be easier for me and I’d be less likely to be picked out as a tourist.”
“See, that’s the thing. You are not a tourist here.” His body moves slightly on the park bench and I jump. “Please, I will not hurt you. You must know this,” he says. “Here,” he says pointing to my information page. “Do you know how to read Cyrillic?”
“No,” I say slightly embarrassed by that fact.
“But I do. And everyone in this park does as well, so if you don’t believe what I’m about to tell you you can ask anyone and they will confirm my words.”
What in the heck?
Artem takes a deep breath.
“Your father underestimated you. He knew if he sent you over with an American passport, with his name, someone would know. We were watching for both names to show up on the inbound travelers database.”
“We?”
“My sister and I.”
“You have a sister?”
“Yes, and you’ve met her.”
“I haven’t met anyone other than you. What in the hell’s going on?”
Artem reaches back into his pocket and hands me a picture of a man holding a baby. It’s a black and white photo and appears to be taken here.
“Look at the leg,” he says.
“Okay,” I say noticing a birthmark on the calf.
“Look familiar?”
“There’s a birthmark on the baby’s leg. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“It doesn’t?”
“So I have a birthmark on my leg. Plenty of people in the world do.”
“Do you think the baby in the picture looks like you?”
I look closer. “It could be.”
“It is. This is a photograph of your father holding you when you were very small.”
“That doesn’t look like my father,” I say.
“That is where the problem begins,” he says.
I feel my heart drop in my chest.
“On December 26, 1991 the Soviet Union fell. Imagine…all the business at the time were owned by the state, and now suddenly things would be turned over to private individuals. As you can imagine there was a scrum for just about every type of business available. There were bribes, favors, even murder. If you were able to take over one of these government run businesses for yourself it was like winning the lottery. You were born nine years after this, as you know.
But what most people don’t know is that when the Soviet Union fell things didn’t just immediately change overnight. It’s similar to your Civil War. Many people lost their lives after the ceasefire. Do you think they just suddenly lose their anger and stop fighting? And how long did it even take for some of those soldiers to receive a message that a ceasefire had been called? Days? Weeks? Even months or more in some cases.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“Everything. There was a man who had a plan. He was a very bad man. He knew his neighbor had secured the license for a private design firm. The firm was to design many of the things for the Russian government and would be worth a lot of money in a very short period of time. The man who was given this contract was one of the few honest men, and he had experience in design and it was a good fit.
But see he traveled a lot, and his bad neighbor knew this. So one night he broke into the man’s house, trying to find this contract, but instead he found the man and his wife and their child having a candlelight dinner with the man’s best friend.
Upon realizing his mistake he pulled out a gun, shooting and killing the wife and shooting the two men and leaving them for dead.
He found the contract, realized he was in big trouble, and came up with a plan.
He grabbed the little girl and drove to the airport where he bribed an official to forge some documents that said you were his niece and he flew to America to apply for asylum as a refugee of communism.
Before he even got his application in he met some other Russians, realized there was an incredible amount of money in the sex trade, and decided to keep the girl he brought with him. A Russian man traveling by himself raises eyebrows. A nice father with a daughter does not.
He thought this little girl could serve as his runner, making trips back and forth to Russia to do things as needed. And if she was unruly or didn’t want to he could always sell her into the sex trade…she wasn’t his real daughter anyways so he didn’t care.
So his plan could work, but when he found out the two men he had shot had survived, he had to quickly find some money to Western Union back to Russia to bribe an official to throw them in prison so they could not talk or be heard.
And not just any prison, but Siberia. The same prison where Vladimir Putin, to this day, puts the men who he despises most. It’s literally the end of the earth. The ground is frozen year round as are the chances of ever leaving.
But he underestimated the two men, and in the meantime DNA evidence had started to become used in Russia.
One of these men was freed recently and the other is due to get out very, very soon.”
“Artem! What does this have to do with me? Why did you have my passport?”
He takes another deep breath and looks at me even more intensely than before.
“Your mother did not die in childbirth. The man who has pretended for all these years killed her, and at the same time filled your real father and I full of bullets, but we survived. That is why I got my first tattoo, to cover those bullet holes and to try and create a backstory in prison so your father and I could survive.
This beast fled with you to the States, knowing they had no extradition treaty with Russia, and also knowing they were accepting many refugees from the Balkans War at the time.
This passport that he gave you,” he says tapping on my passport.
“Is a renewal of a fake passport. It has your real last name, but in Cyrillic letters. He was too stupid, or likely scared, to apply for an American passport for you with his last name because he knew
we would see the visa application very easily.
But we were looking for both last names because we knew.
I got out of prison first, two weeks ago, exonerated for killing a woman who was like a best friend to me…your mother.
With the connections I made inside I put together a plan to avenge her death and bring you back to your real father at the same time.
This man in Miami…he is not your real father and he will not come to Russia because he knows we will kill him for what he did. But as much as I want to watch him squirm as he… I won’t go into detail about that in front of a woman, but I want him to pay for what he did.
And that’s what’s going to happen. I set up a deal for him to ship weapons to Vietnam in exchange for a Bitcoin payment. He also gets a container of Vietnamese women to arrive in the port to put in jobs working as manicurists and sex laborers.
At least that’s he what thought. But he will hurt no more women, or anyone. He’s done enough damage to last a billion lifetimes.
My sister. She came to your hotel room the last time you spoke with your father on the phone. I’m sure you remember her. She was dressed as hotel staff and was doing her best to keep you occupied as long as she could.”
“Why?”
“I was in the next room over. The hotel carelessly didn’t have a password on their Wi-Fi and I was able to remotely access your computer from the room next door, where I was staying and why it was so easy to meet you in the lobby each morning, and transfer all the Bitcoin out. That is what was on that USB drive you were to come here to get.
That beast back in Miami sent you here to pick up a Bitcoin payment for weapons and women.
That man has already had the supplier ship the weapons to Vietnam and needs that Bitcoin to pay the Russians for the firearms. He’s the middleman and he has no way of paying now.
And regarding that payment, that USB drive.
My sister pretended to be you to receive the USB drive in the initial exchange from the man in Miami’s best friend, a man you saw me dispose of in the train station and then I filled his role knowing you wouldn’t know what he looked like, but we didn’t have the password.
Once we arranged the drop of the USB drive to her something seemed off and they sent someone to get her.
She brought the USB drive to me, which I then handed off to you because we still needed the password to access the funds.
And of course the henchmen were already smelling something fishy so they came after us…twice as I’m sure you remember.”
“So where do we stand now?”
“All the henchmen are dead and the man in Miami’s best friend too. You saw this first hand.
The man back in Miami is as good as dead man.
My sister is safe. You are safe.
And most importantly you are back home where you belong.
And even more importantly you are mine,”
My head is absolutely spinning right now as I work through this elaborate scheme I’ve just been told.
A scheme I’m not even sure I believe at this point. This seems so far fetched and absurd that there’s no way it can be true. But then again I remember reading in Psychology Today that if you want to pull off a big con you’re actually better off having a huge, grandiose tale to tell then something simple and possibly believable. It’s counterintuitive but it’s worked that way for years, somehow it fits better in the human brain’s ability to reason that it could be true.
So what does this all mean?
I’m engaged to a man who’s been in prison for…years.
The man who I’ve always known as my father is now “the man in Miami.”
And that I’ve been kidnapped…twice! Once to take me to the States when I was too young to know what was going on or to remember, and now Artem, if that’s even his real name. He didn’t technically kidnap me, so I can’t go to the cops if I want, but what he did is close enough.
I have no idea what to think but there’s one big question I need to know then.
“If I’m to believe this, and I’m a long ways from that right now, then where is my real father?”
“He gets out of prison tomorrow and he’s coming here immediately to meet with his daughter.”
“And he has only one daughter, right?”
“Yes. You.”
CHAPTER 21
Alice
The rest of the day I’m jumpy, looking over my shoulder and around every wall and down every alley we cross.
Artem’s story is something that would be literally ripped from the headlines of the news, and being that he’s Russian doesn’t help much either considering how much Russia’s been in the news the last few years.
But that’s the thing. No matter how you slice it I’m Russian too. I just hope I don’t get sliced up in the process of finding out what’s true and what’s make believe.
And I believe Artem even though in some ways I feel like the woman in the scary movie that’s too stupid to live.
But I agreed to be his wife, the ring on my hand the visual reminder, and I take that promise seriously.
Life is full of challenges and it’s more how you deal with them and how you get up after you take a hit than anything else.
And speaking of taking a hit, Artem showed me the entry wounds in his abs from the bullets. Most of them hit right along the cuts in his abs so that plus the tattoos plus all the years that have gone by conceal them on first glance, but they are definitely there.
And I think back to last night. Most of the times I ran my hands along his body including his chest, completely missing my opportunity to see these warning signs…if in fact they even are.
There’s something very attractive about a man who was wrongfully punished, but instead of complaining or crying or saying whoa is me, he plotted and planned waiting for this moment.
And this moment isn’t just about him, but about my parents.
And that makes it equally as hard for him, if not initially harder.
Artem takes me to some library where we have to get special permission to access old microfiche records.
At first he’s translating everything for me, but then he sees some doubt in my eyes. We’re so deep in the library basement we have to go back up so I can download an app called “Scan & Translate.” That combined with Google Translate lets me see firsthand exactly what he’s telling me.
I find my birth record with the help of a librarian and I run it through my app.
It checks out.
Everything Artem has told me so far is true. There’s no denying that. And now I suddenly feel like I’m the one who has to prove myself to him. That my love for him is what I say it is.
He’s gone through a lifetime of pain just to get to this point. I just had to show up, granted my backstory is a lot different than I ever knew.
Artem tells me we can go to the Russian authorities to get a new passport, but only after some time passes. He also says I should apply for a proper American passport at the American embassy in a few weeks.
As much as he loves me and wants me here with him, I love that his experience and maturity shows that he’s making the best decisions for me even with no benefit to himself.
If I have an American passport, and I know he doesn’t, I could theoretically leave him high and dry at any time. But he tells me it’s always good to have a backup plan. Maybe that’s a consequence of how the events in his life have unfolded to this point and growing up in a communist country.
I don’t know and I can’t imagine.
And I also can’t imagine what’s going to happen to my father.
When I asked him he told me point blank that his first thought was maybe I did have some feelings for that man, even though what he did was very wrong. He knew in my mind I might see him as my father or maybe upon the news this would turn into a Stockholm syndrome type of thing.
But then reason took over. He knew the kind of person it takes to do what he did and he knew with behavior that
brutal he wouldn’t suddenly become a good person.
He told me he and his sister’s original plan was to let me make my own choice not only about my father, but also about if I wanted them to release the Bitcoin payment thus saving the man in Miami, as we now refer to him.
Possessive Russian: An Older Man Younger Woman Romance (A Man Who Knows What He Wants Book 79) Page 8
