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activities.
    Nikolai chuckled. “A straight businessman. That’s too bad, Alexei. You certainly had the skills to really help out some of the not-so-straight businessmen.”
    I sighed. “I know.” And I did know. I was a skilled sharp-shooter and sniper. I was also extremely skilled in computer hacking. That was the part of the business back home that I didn’t mind so much – the cyberhacking. We were stealing money from large banks on Wall Street and London, money that they probably never missed. I didn’t feel that was necessarily wrong, as I knew what these banks did. How crooked they were. HSBC was our prime target, and this bank was laundering billions of dollars themselves for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels.
    There was supposed to be honor among thieves, but I truly felt disgusted with these banks and their behavior. So, I was put in charge of the cybercrime division of our group, as everything else we did was completely repugnant to me. My father was mindful of my proclivities, which is why he chose that particular assignment for me.
    I found out, when I was only 15, how good I was with cybercrime. Computers always came easily to me, and I had an excellent mentor in the field. His name was Vladislov, and he had been doing it for 20 years himself. He taught me everything I knew, and, I admit, I took to it like a duck to water. So, that was what I did until my father “released” me from his service, telling me that he wanted better for me, and that he knew, with my intelligence and ingenuity, I could go far in America. Even he couldn’t anticipate exactly how far, though. That was a surprise to everyone back home. It was even a surprise for me.
    But, of course, my life back in Russia was not without violence. I was still basically a soldier in the group, and, as such, I had to run security and surveillance. More than once, I had to kill in self-defense, and, more than once, I was assigned to take out somebody who was a rat. We couldn’t have rats, of course, and there were quite a few of them in our organization. I hated doing that, of course, but I knew that it was me or them, and I chose me. Besides, everyone knew that being a rat meant that you had a short life in the organization. Literally.
    Now, here I was, trying to desperately save the woman I loved from certain harm if not death. And I was rusty, to say the very least. That was why it was so important Nikolai be here, because Nikolai wasn’t rusty. He was still in the organization. He had amazing reflexes and had no compunction about killing somebody who was threatening his life or any of the lives of his comrades.
    Right now, he was invaluable to me.
    We drove along in silence to the bar where Sophie was going to be. I would be able to bring Nikolai’s pistol into the bar with me, as I had long since obtained a concealed carry permit. I had to, considering my past. I simply told the State of New York that I needed this permit because I had been threatened by some unhinged person who hated me because he was paranoid and thought that I was trying to take over the world with my company. All that was true, of course. I had been threatened by a schizophrenic who accused me of attempting world domination. I wasn’t actually, personally, threatened by him, though. I could take him, and I knew that I had bodyguards who could also take care of him.
    He provided me a good excuse, however, to have a concealed carry permit, so I actually was grateful to the poor crazy guy.
    Nikolai chuckled. “This is like old times, isn’t it, Alexei? Having a meeting with some person who is possibly dangerous and wants to stab us in the back. All those meetings didn’t exactly go as planned, though.”
    I shook my head. “No, they didn’t, did they? We always tried, though. We always tried to talk some sense into those men, but, if they couldn’t be reasoned with, what else could we do than what we did?”
    “Very true, very true,” he said. “So, you really