Post by Immanuel Taylor on Aug 26, 2011 15:13:03 GMT -5
“Welcome to the United States of America, sir”
Vitali took back his American passport from the young lady at the Immigration desk. He just had it finished in Moscow, just in time to catch a train back to Nizhny Novgorod where he caught an Aeroflat-affiliated airline back to Los Angeles. Vitali spent five nights in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles before catching a pre-booked one way Amtrak train from the Los Angeles Union Station to the Financial District of San Francisco. The voyage itself had two stops. Firstly, a bus from Los Angeles to Bakersfield, which consumed a grand total of two hours and fifteen minutes, at which point Vitali hitched a train that took him to Emeryville. This trip is intended to take a whopping five hours and fifty eight minutes with Vitali already two hours in.
Vitali rested comfortably in the business class section of the train. His years of work for Mr. Jordan King, CEO of Sun-Times Media Group, gave Vitali a meaty savings account and accelerated his acquirement of US Citizenship and, finally, a Passport. He managed to get these four months before the September 11 attacks. On his many trips back to Russia, Vitali always caught a curious or, sometimes, hateful glance from the Russian clerks at the airport.
"Are you done with that, sir?"
"Yes" Vitali responded to the attendant, who took his finished tray of vegetables and fruit salad.
"Would you like a glass of wine?"
"Hmm….Can you just bring me more coffee, please?"
"Of course, sir"
Vitali Khodorkovsky's English, at this point of his career, is fluent and eloquent in speech. He learnt it when he first came to the US in the early nineties after the Berlin wall fell. After smuggling himself in the country, a very easy process for Soviet citizens with the right contracts right around the dissolution, Vitali struggled until he met Jordan King who was just then in the midst of his rise to the top of the Sun-Times Media Group. The first thing Vitali did when King hired him as his personal thug was buy himself a hot meal and register for English courses at a local community college.
By now, Vitali already speaks English, Russian, Ukrainian and German fluently, along with some decent French. He had not put much effort into learning French. Now done with his meal and armed with a newly refilled cup of coffee, Vitali pulled his briefcase from under his seat and took out the results of the Vocal Analysis he had done on Immanuel Taylor.
The vocal analysis procedure is relatively simple to do and Vitali had called in a favor from someone he knew deep in the Kremlin. The man in question had served in the same prison Vitali served in, back in Zhytomyr during the days of Communism. He owes a lot to Vitali for what did not happen in there. And now, decades later after the fall, Vitali called in this favor and had the vocal analysis results done in a matter of days rather than the customary time of a matter of months.
Vitali also had a two more passports done for himself. This required him calling in a favor from another man, a fellow Ex- Vor v Zakone (Thief in Law) from Vitali’s past. Like the vocal analysis, it was an easy procedure, an updated Israeli one and a newly feigned German one. They should arrive at his condo in Chicago, Illinois in a week or two. The plan is simple. He's heading back to San Francisco now at which point he'll share the results of the folder to Mark Rivera, probably spend another two weeks researching into Immanuel's past. His contract with Rivera expires around September, at which he'll return to Chicago and check in on his apartment, do some work for King before taking the winter off and heading back to his dacha in Moscow. Vitali never missed winter back in Russia.
Vitali closed the folder and thought about Immanuel Taylor, also known as Jonathan Harker, for a little bit. The vocal analysis results revealed some very interesting things to Vitali, really interesting, but overall, this Immanuel guy isn't special. Just another man with an opaque past. Vitali quickly lost interest and, despite the caffeine-riddled coffee, actually dozed off a while. An attendant woke him up when the Amtrak train reached Emeryville and Vitali proceeded to complete his journey with a 30 minute bus ride to the Financial District of San Francisco, arriving at 4:35 PM.
-------------------
"Vitali! I have an emergency!" Rivera screamed as he greeted Vitali in a semi-private room in The Dirty Martini nightclub in the Fisherman's Wharf district of San Francisco. Vitali, dressed sharply in a blue and black suit with a nice striped tie, was slightly taken back by Rivera’s sudden scream. He stood there and listened with the utmost level of tension.
“It’s my cat, Vitali” said Rivera. “I think she’s a communist. All she keeps saying is “Mao” over and over again”
Rivera let out a distorted laugh and patted Vitali repeatedly on the shoulder, indicating the ending of his joke. Vitali stood there in his emotionless deadpan style and did not move, awaiting Rivera to do so. He simply nodded at Rivera’s joke. The owner of the EUW-Asylum kept his hand on Vitali’s shoulder but stopped laughing.
“Ok, Vitali, come take a seat and let’s get to business” Rivera, having already put an end to his joke, escorted his hired thug to a L-shaped table placed across a huge multi-faceted window overlooking the dance floor of the Dirty Martini nightclub at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, California. The music was already well on its way with endless teens tapping around, their bottoms shaking and their hips grooving. Vitali had managed to get an earful of the music when he passed by, noticing it was some kind of Heavy Metal marries Techno but has an affair with R&B trendy thing. For some reason, he thought it sounded like a giraffe being raped with a cowbell. But alas, the kids are shaking their tight butts to it and thus it is hip and hop.
It wasn’t until Vitali sat down and diverted his eyes from the window that he noticed there was another gentlemen standing at the other exit of the door. A well-built man in a sharp suit with a gun stuffed in his jacket pocket. Vitali easily spotted it. Rivera glanced at the folder Vitali had in his arms.
“Is that the results of that test you had done?”
“Yes” Vitali laid it down on the table and opened the folder. He put on his reading glasses “He is a Slav in terms of ethnicity. More precisely, he is Southern Slavic which puts him geographically around Balkan peninsula, the southern Pannonian Plain and the eastern Alps. Now, one of the items on the copy of the DVD you gave me had a clip of an interview Immanuel did.”
“Yes. A very bad one if I recall”
“Yes, well my contact was able to extract the voice snippet and run it through a Vocal Analysis test. Since Immanuel was speaking English, the analysis points to English being at the very least a third language. Based on aspects of it such as pronunciation”
Rivera brought the folder close to him and, with his reading glasses on, leaned over to analyze the folder. “At the very least? So English is either his third language or fourth or fifth or beyond that, correct?”
“Yes” Vitali took off his reading glasses. “And, geographically based on his ethinicity along with the vocal analysis test, he would have been born in Yugoslavia as an Slav ethnic Croat.
"A goat?"
"A Croat" Rivera took off his reading glasses "As in from Croatia, which used to be part of Yugoslavia."
“Jesus Christ” Rivera said, blatantly using the lord’s name in vain. “
"Wasn't there a war over there in Yugoslavia? A genocide even?"
"I think that was the Bosnian, the Croatian War of Independence ended around 1995. Immanuel or Jonathan isn't either a Serb or a Bosniak "
Rivera shook his head in disbelief whilst massaging his neck. It is only now, bombarded with history and names of ethnic group that he fully grasped how convoluted this god-damned investigation has become.
"So what this means is that Immanuel Taylor or Jonathan Harker or whatever his name is wasn’t born in the United States, that he was born in Croatia during the Yugoslavia unification or something like that, and there was a war and and that he….wait, would he have illegally immigrated here before or after?"
"Probably during. I'm not sure on this though"
"Well, it still doesn't make any sense. So the guy has a fucked up past, he crawls here into the U S of A, steals an identity of a black American who fought in the Gulf War and lays low for a couple of years until he suddenly decides to play wrestling on national television? What the fuck?"
"Mr. Rivera, when it comes to investigating someone's past, especially when that someone like Immanuel knows how to hide something, there are numerous scenarios. For all I know, he may have legally immigrated here and changed his name which, by coincedence, happens to be the same as that of another Immanuel Taylor who served in the Gulf War and..."
Vitali paused.
"Wait.....yes, yes. That may have happened but there is one fact I am sure of. He is a former solider. I saw it in his eyes when I saw his photograph for the first time. As someone who comes from a family of soldiers, from the Imperial Army to the Soviet one, I am positive of this."
"Great, so this could mean that he, what, fought in Yugoslavia, pulled off a massacre or two and then decided to come to America just like that?"
"Maybe"
Rivera covered his eyes with his hand, visibly annoyed with the direction this investigation is going. He raised his head back up and went to speak when a young girl knocked at the door and entered fully equipped with a mini-skirt and a nice-looking see-thru white blouse. She came over and placed a large blue bottle on the table next to the folder.
“Shot glasses are coming up, Mr. Rivera” She said as she straightened her blouse. Vital was respectful enough to look her in the face rather than glare at her nicely-looking breasts or her slick white thighs. The guard in the cowboy suit diverted his attention to her ass as Rivera inspected the blue glass bottle. She continued speaking.
“This is for the 9 PM meeting I have with those executives from…umm….”
“From the National Park Service. They’re gonna be here shortly”
“Yes. Thank you, Melissa.”
Melissa walked away and departed the room as Vitali glanced at the blue bottle. “ROYAL SALUTE. THE HUNDRED CASK. SCOTCH WHISKEY”. Vitali took note of how alcohol beverages tend to foreshadow the nature of the meeting to be conducted with their presence.
“Don’t let her appearance fool you. She’s a medical student over at UCSF. I paid for her tuition”
“That sounds noble, Mr. Rivera”
“Yes, especially considering the state of today’s economy. Of course, this little gig is so she can pay for that nice downtown apartment of hers. And, on top of all of this, she and I have a little...arrangement behind closed doors. An intimate one that pays supplements her savings account well”
Any normal human being would normally be disgusted by a young woman literally and figuratively whoring herself out to a rich creep and punk like Mark Rivera but Vitali found himself indifferent to it. Just another person trying to get by. Vitali, now in his early sixties, was in a similar position to Melissa during his youth back in Zhytomyr. Whether it’s a free market system or a command economy, not many people realize how little control they have over their lives.
“I tried to take him out at the Pay Per View we had two days ago” Rivera had already opened the whisky bottle and poured himself a drink. “A Pay Per View is like a supercard or something, you know, a bigger event than a normal show. Anyways, I put him in a Barbed Wire match with Tyreke Bell for the Hardkore Title”
“Barbed wire? Do they use it as a weapon?”
“No, no. The ropes are covered with it. That’s the beauty of wrestling. You put two guys in a dangerous situation and watch as they beat the living shit out of each other.” Rivera gulped down his drink. “Problem is, it didn’t work. The other guy got hurt instead. Tyreke Bell. Got cut really bad, lost a lot of blood and went into shock on the way to the hospital. Doctors said I had to pull him out of the active roster for the time being which means I’m officially one man short and Immanuel fucking Taylor is back being the Hardkore Champion.”
Rivera poured himself another drink as Vitali sat there, waiting for Rivera to say the right words. Rivera poured Vitali a drink and placed the shot glass in front of him.
“Drink it”
“I don’t drink alcohol, Mr. Rivera”
“Drink it. I’m paying you to do this so drink and then I can ask you something very specific”
Vitali’s eyes zeroed in on the shot glass. He picked it up and downed it down his throat before placing it back at the exact position it was on the table. Rivera’s eyes darted from Vitali’s face to the shot glass and back to Vitali’s face where Vitali’s eyes met his. Rivera then began.
“Can you kill Immanuel Taylor?”
Vitali didn’t blink and he did not need to take a drink before hearing a question like that. Khodorkovsky has been in this situation many, many times before. He answered calmly and loudly.
“No”
“Yeah…I thought so” Rivera poured himself another drink and gulped it down. “Eh…plus, it won’t look good If the Hardkore champion suffers an accident, especially since the former holder is currently in the hospital. Of course, this is a fucking shame since we’re going to have the next episode in Russia which is what I was going to tell you before you…”
“Where in Russia?”
“Moscow, of course. Where else would we go to? Fucking Siberia?”
Vitali took out a notepad from the inner pocket of the jacket of his suit. He did it slowly, so as not to arouse the suspicions of the cowboy suit guard. He tore a paper out of his note book, took out a Harold’ s silver pen from his shirt pocket and wrote down a number before folding the paper and sliding it over to Rivera with his fingers. He tapped it twice with those same fingers before reaching his hand back.
“This is a number of guy in Moscow, an old friend of mine. He can do the hit for you for a price. He was a soldier, he fought in both Chechen Wars” Vitali put the notepad and pen back into his dress jacket. “In case you decide to change your mind”
Rivera didn’t touch the piece of paper, he just stared at it. He then made eye contact with Vitali once again. A knock came from the door and in popped Melissa in her whorish outfit.
“Mr. Rivera, your business guests arrived five minutes ago”
“Send them right in, sweetheart.” Rivera said after recollecting himself mentally. “Send them right in”
Vitali took this as a cue for his exit and slowly got back up, moving to the end of the circular seating and getting off. Rivera did the same from the opposite end and accompanied Vitali to the door.
“When does Jordan want you back in Chicago, Vitali?”
“Sometime in October, I have an assignment in November so I have to be there by then at the maximum”
“At the maximum, yes” Rivera opened the door for Vitali before putting his hand on his shoulder and speaking slightly softer. “Stay off Immanuel until the next episode of Vengeance. If you see him in person, follow him back home, find out where he’s staying. I’ll have my secretary send you a ticket to Moscow, I want you there. I’ll be going there a couple of days early, I have a lot of EUW-related stuff to take care of. I’ll book an afternoon appointment just for you and we can see if some of your former acquaintances in Moscow can maybe give us a hand. Sound good?”
“Yes” Vitali extended his hand. “Goodbye, Mr. Rivera”
“Goodbye Vitali”
Vitali Khodorkovsky made his way outside Rivera’s office as the two business clients acquainted with Rivera entered the office. The piece of paper Vitali had scribbled a number onto laid there on the table, untouched by Mark Rivera.
Vitali took back his American passport from the young lady at the Immigration desk. He just had it finished in Moscow, just in time to catch a train back to Nizhny Novgorod where he caught an Aeroflat-affiliated airline back to Los Angeles. Vitali spent five nights in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles before catching a pre-booked one way Amtrak train from the Los Angeles Union Station to the Financial District of San Francisco. The voyage itself had two stops. Firstly, a bus from Los Angeles to Bakersfield, which consumed a grand total of two hours and fifteen minutes, at which point Vitali hitched a train that took him to Emeryville. This trip is intended to take a whopping five hours and fifty eight minutes with Vitali already two hours in.
Vitali rested comfortably in the business class section of the train. His years of work for Mr. Jordan King, CEO of Sun-Times Media Group, gave Vitali a meaty savings account and accelerated his acquirement of US Citizenship and, finally, a Passport. He managed to get these four months before the September 11 attacks. On his many trips back to Russia, Vitali always caught a curious or, sometimes, hateful glance from the Russian clerks at the airport.
"Are you done with that, sir?"
"Yes" Vitali responded to the attendant, who took his finished tray of vegetables and fruit salad.
"Would you like a glass of wine?"
"Hmm….Can you just bring me more coffee, please?"
"Of course, sir"
Vitali Khodorkovsky's English, at this point of his career, is fluent and eloquent in speech. He learnt it when he first came to the US in the early nineties after the Berlin wall fell. After smuggling himself in the country, a very easy process for Soviet citizens with the right contracts right around the dissolution, Vitali struggled until he met Jordan King who was just then in the midst of his rise to the top of the Sun-Times Media Group. The first thing Vitali did when King hired him as his personal thug was buy himself a hot meal and register for English courses at a local community college.
By now, Vitali already speaks English, Russian, Ukrainian and German fluently, along with some decent French. He had not put much effort into learning French. Now done with his meal and armed with a newly refilled cup of coffee, Vitali pulled his briefcase from under his seat and took out the results of the Vocal Analysis he had done on Immanuel Taylor.
The vocal analysis procedure is relatively simple to do and Vitali had called in a favor from someone he knew deep in the Kremlin. The man in question had served in the same prison Vitali served in, back in Zhytomyr during the days of Communism. He owes a lot to Vitali for what did not happen in there. And now, decades later after the fall, Vitali called in this favor and had the vocal analysis results done in a matter of days rather than the customary time of a matter of months.
Vitali also had a two more passports done for himself. This required him calling in a favor from another man, a fellow Ex- Vor v Zakone (Thief in Law) from Vitali’s past. Like the vocal analysis, it was an easy procedure, an updated Israeli one and a newly feigned German one. They should arrive at his condo in Chicago, Illinois in a week or two. The plan is simple. He's heading back to San Francisco now at which point he'll share the results of the folder to Mark Rivera, probably spend another two weeks researching into Immanuel's past. His contract with Rivera expires around September, at which he'll return to Chicago and check in on his apartment, do some work for King before taking the winter off and heading back to his dacha in Moscow. Vitali never missed winter back in Russia.
Vitali closed the folder and thought about Immanuel Taylor, also known as Jonathan Harker, for a little bit. The vocal analysis results revealed some very interesting things to Vitali, really interesting, but overall, this Immanuel guy isn't special. Just another man with an opaque past. Vitali quickly lost interest and, despite the caffeine-riddled coffee, actually dozed off a while. An attendant woke him up when the Amtrak train reached Emeryville and Vitali proceeded to complete his journey with a 30 minute bus ride to the Financial District of San Francisco, arriving at 4:35 PM.
-------------------
"Vitali! I have an emergency!" Rivera screamed as he greeted Vitali in a semi-private room in The Dirty Martini nightclub in the Fisherman's Wharf district of San Francisco. Vitali, dressed sharply in a blue and black suit with a nice striped tie, was slightly taken back by Rivera’s sudden scream. He stood there and listened with the utmost level of tension.
“It’s my cat, Vitali” said Rivera. “I think she’s a communist. All she keeps saying is “Mao” over and over again”
Rivera let out a distorted laugh and patted Vitali repeatedly on the shoulder, indicating the ending of his joke. Vitali stood there in his emotionless deadpan style and did not move, awaiting Rivera to do so. He simply nodded at Rivera’s joke. The owner of the EUW-Asylum kept his hand on Vitali’s shoulder but stopped laughing.
“Ok, Vitali, come take a seat and let’s get to business” Rivera, having already put an end to his joke, escorted his hired thug to a L-shaped table placed across a huge multi-faceted window overlooking the dance floor of the Dirty Martini nightclub at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, California. The music was already well on its way with endless teens tapping around, their bottoms shaking and their hips grooving. Vitali had managed to get an earful of the music when he passed by, noticing it was some kind of Heavy Metal marries Techno but has an affair with R&B trendy thing. For some reason, he thought it sounded like a giraffe being raped with a cowbell. But alas, the kids are shaking their tight butts to it and thus it is hip and hop.
It wasn’t until Vitali sat down and diverted his eyes from the window that he noticed there was another gentlemen standing at the other exit of the door. A well-built man in a sharp suit with a gun stuffed in his jacket pocket. Vitali easily spotted it. Rivera glanced at the folder Vitali had in his arms.
“Is that the results of that test you had done?”
“Yes” Vitali laid it down on the table and opened the folder. He put on his reading glasses “He is a Slav in terms of ethnicity. More precisely, he is Southern Slavic which puts him geographically around Balkan peninsula, the southern Pannonian Plain and the eastern Alps. Now, one of the items on the copy of the DVD you gave me had a clip of an interview Immanuel did.”
“Yes. A very bad one if I recall”
“Yes, well my contact was able to extract the voice snippet and run it through a Vocal Analysis test. Since Immanuel was speaking English, the analysis points to English being at the very least a third language. Based on aspects of it such as pronunciation”
Rivera brought the folder close to him and, with his reading glasses on, leaned over to analyze the folder. “At the very least? So English is either his third language or fourth or fifth or beyond that, correct?”
“Yes” Vitali took off his reading glasses. “And, geographically based on his ethinicity along with the vocal analysis test, he would have been born in Yugoslavia as an Slav ethnic Croat.
"A goat?"
"A Croat" Rivera took off his reading glasses "As in from Croatia, which used to be part of Yugoslavia."
“Jesus Christ” Rivera said, blatantly using the lord’s name in vain. “
"Wasn't there a war over there in Yugoslavia? A genocide even?"
"I think that was the Bosnian, the Croatian War of Independence ended around 1995. Immanuel or Jonathan isn't either a Serb or a Bosniak "
Rivera shook his head in disbelief whilst massaging his neck. It is only now, bombarded with history and names of ethnic group that he fully grasped how convoluted this god-damned investigation has become.
"So what this means is that Immanuel Taylor or Jonathan Harker or whatever his name is wasn’t born in the United States, that he was born in Croatia during the Yugoslavia unification or something like that, and there was a war and and that he….wait, would he have illegally immigrated here before or after?"
"Probably during. I'm not sure on this though"
"Well, it still doesn't make any sense. So the guy has a fucked up past, he crawls here into the U S of A, steals an identity of a black American who fought in the Gulf War and lays low for a couple of years until he suddenly decides to play wrestling on national television? What the fuck?"
"Mr. Rivera, when it comes to investigating someone's past, especially when that someone like Immanuel knows how to hide something, there are numerous scenarios. For all I know, he may have legally immigrated here and changed his name which, by coincedence, happens to be the same as that of another Immanuel Taylor who served in the Gulf War and..."
Vitali paused.
"Wait.....yes, yes. That may have happened but there is one fact I am sure of. He is a former solider. I saw it in his eyes when I saw his photograph for the first time. As someone who comes from a family of soldiers, from the Imperial Army to the Soviet one, I am positive of this."
"Great, so this could mean that he, what, fought in Yugoslavia, pulled off a massacre or two and then decided to come to America just like that?"
"Maybe"
Rivera covered his eyes with his hand, visibly annoyed with the direction this investigation is going. He raised his head back up and went to speak when a young girl knocked at the door and entered fully equipped with a mini-skirt and a nice-looking see-thru white blouse. She came over and placed a large blue bottle on the table next to the folder.
“Shot glasses are coming up, Mr. Rivera” She said as she straightened her blouse. Vital was respectful enough to look her in the face rather than glare at her nicely-looking breasts or her slick white thighs. The guard in the cowboy suit diverted his attention to her ass as Rivera inspected the blue glass bottle. She continued speaking.
“This is for the 9 PM meeting I have with those executives from…umm….”
“From the National Park Service. They’re gonna be here shortly”
“Yes. Thank you, Melissa.”
Melissa walked away and departed the room as Vitali glanced at the blue bottle. “ROYAL SALUTE. THE HUNDRED CASK. SCOTCH WHISKEY”. Vitali took note of how alcohol beverages tend to foreshadow the nature of the meeting to be conducted with their presence.
“Don’t let her appearance fool you. She’s a medical student over at UCSF. I paid for her tuition”
“That sounds noble, Mr. Rivera”
“Yes, especially considering the state of today’s economy. Of course, this little gig is so she can pay for that nice downtown apartment of hers. And, on top of all of this, she and I have a little...arrangement behind closed doors. An intimate one that pays supplements her savings account well”
Any normal human being would normally be disgusted by a young woman literally and figuratively whoring herself out to a rich creep and punk like Mark Rivera but Vitali found himself indifferent to it. Just another person trying to get by. Vitali, now in his early sixties, was in a similar position to Melissa during his youth back in Zhytomyr. Whether it’s a free market system or a command economy, not many people realize how little control they have over their lives.
“I tried to take him out at the Pay Per View we had two days ago” Rivera had already opened the whisky bottle and poured himself a drink. “A Pay Per View is like a supercard or something, you know, a bigger event than a normal show. Anyways, I put him in a Barbed Wire match with Tyreke Bell for the Hardkore Title”
“Barbed wire? Do they use it as a weapon?”
“No, no. The ropes are covered with it. That’s the beauty of wrestling. You put two guys in a dangerous situation and watch as they beat the living shit out of each other.” Rivera gulped down his drink. “Problem is, it didn’t work. The other guy got hurt instead. Tyreke Bell. Got cut really bad, lost a lot of blood and went into shock on the way to the hospital. Doctors said I had to pull him out of the active roster for the time being which means I’m officially one man short and Immanuel fucking Taylor is back being the Hardkore Champion.”
Rivera poured himself another drink as Vitali sat there, waiting for Rivera to say the right words. Rivera poured Vitali a drink and placed the shot glass in front of him.
“Drink it”
“I don’t drink alcohol, Mr. Rivera”
“Drink it. I’m paying you to do this so drink and then I can ask you something very specific”
Vitali’s eyes zeroed in on the shot glass. He picked it up and downed it down his throat before placing it back at the exact position it was on the table. Rivera’s eyes darted from Vitali’s face to the shot glass and back to Vitali’s face where Vitali’s eyes met his. Rivera then began.
“Can you kill Immanuel Taylor?”
Vitali didn’t blink and he did not need to take a drink before hearing a question like that. Khodorkovsky has been in this situation many, many times before. He answered calmly and loudly.
“No”
“Yeah…I thought so” Rivera poured himself another drink and gulped it down. “Eh…plus, it won’t look good If the Hardkore champion suffers an accident, especially since the former holder is currently in the hospital. Of course, this is a fucking shame since we’re going to have the next episode in Russia which is what I was going to tell you before you…”
“Where in Russia?”
“Moscow, of course. Where else would we go to? Fucking Siberia?”
Vitali took out a notepad from the inner pocket of the jacket of his suit. He did it slowly, so as not to arouse the suspicions of the cowboy suit guard. He tore a paper out of his note book, took out a Harold’ s silver pen from his shirt pocket and wrote down a number before folding the paper and sliding it over to Rivera with his fingers. He tapped it twice with those same fingers before reaching his hand back.
“This is a number of guy in Moscow, an old friend of mine. He can do the hit for you for a price. He was a soldier, he fought in both Chechen Wars” Vitali put the notepad and pen back into his dress jacket. “In case you decide to change your mind”
Rivera didn’t touch the piece of paper, he just stared at it. He then made eye contact with Vitali once again. A knock came from the door and in popped Melissa in her whorish outfit.
“Mr. Rivera, your business guests arrived five minutes ago”
“Send them right in, sweetheart.” Rivera said after recollecting himself mentally. “Send them right in”
Vitali took this as a cue for his exit and slowly got back up, moving to the end of the circular seating and getting off. Rivera did the same from the opposite end and accompanied Vitali to the door.
“When does Jordan want you back in Chicago, Vitali?”
“Sometime in October, I have an assignment in November so I have to be there by then at the maximum”
“At the maximum, yes” Rivera opened the door for Vitali before putting his hand on his shoulder and speaking slightly softer. “Stay off Immanuel until the next episode of Vengeance. If you see him in person, follow him back home, find out where he’s staying. I’ll have my secretary send you a ticket to Moscow, I want you there. I’ll be going there a couple of days early, I have a lot of EUW-related stuff to take care of. I’ll book an afternoon appointment just for you and we can see if some of your former acquaintances in Moscow can maybe give us a hand. Sound good?”
“Yes” Vitali extended his hand. “Goodbye, Mr. Rivera”
“Goodbye Vitali”
Vitali Khodorkovsky made his way outside Rivera’s office as the two business clients acquainted with Rivera entered the office. The piece of paper Vitali had scribbled a number onto laid there on the table, untouched by Mark Rivera.