You Don't Own Me(10)

‘Ingenious?’

He shrugs, the movement careless, elegant and foreign. ‘They were clever scams.’

‘Yeah. Like what?’

‘Like dyeing wood grain alcohol blue, labeling it windshield washer liquid, shipping tanker loads of it back to Russia, un-dyeing it, and selling the stuff as vodka. The goal was to avoid paying alcohol taxes.’

‘I see.’ I say softly. ‘So you were one of those who came to England?’

‘Uh …. hmm.’

‘Did you run the alcohol scam too?’

‘Nope.’

‘Drug dealing?’

‘I used to. I still have good contacts and I can arrange a major deal.’

‘Drugs kill people,’ I whisper.

He looks at me completely unrepentant or ashamed. ‘Drugs are not produced in Russia. I was just the middle-man. Find out who guards the opium fields in Afghanistan and South America then come and lecture me.’

I bite my lower lip. ‘So what did you do? Prostitution?’

‘That’s a great money making model, but it’s not for me. Too messy. I don’t like dealing with people and all their dependences, obsessions and compulsions. I like clean operations.’

I nod. Relieved. ‘What else did you do?’

‘Arms dealing.’

I suppress the frown that wants to knit my forehead. ‘Gun running?’

‘Not just guns. After the fall of communism there was a lot of government arsenal for sale. Long range missiles, tanks, submarines, everything.’

‘Did you sell to the terrorists?’

‘Does the butcher care who buys his meat? I sold to the highest bidder, but I’ll tell you this: the greatest terrorists are governments since I mostly I sold to government-funded terrorists.’

‘If all this is in the past what do you do now?’

‘I specialize in cyber crime.’

‘What kind?’

‘We use sophisticated software to get around the security of banks and the credit card companies, take over their systems, and transfer money into thousands of different accounts that we control. We then move the money so fast and zigzag it through so many different continents it becomes impossible to track.’

I look at him doubtfully. ‘Really? Hackers get caught all the time.’

He shakes his head. ‘The media make a huge fuss over the handfuls of small time hackers operating from their parent’s basement that the authorities catch because they know they can never touch the real criminals. Banks will never reveal how much they are losing because if you knew how many billions are stolen every year by organized crime you would never keep your money in the bank.’

I clear my throat. ‘Is that what you are doing with Lenny?’

His face becomes suddenly stony. ‘I warned you before. Don’t get involved in my business, Dahlia. The less you know the safer I can keep you.’

A sudden fear drops into my stomach. I think of the elaborate security measures that are in place around him. ‘Even you’re not completely safe are you?’

‘It comes with the territory,’ he dismisses. ‘There is also someone who is ready to betray you, who wants what you have.’

‘Why did you chose this life? Constantly being on guard for your life and the threat of prison looming in the horizon.’

‘I didn’t have much of a choice.’

‘You told me once that ultimately everything is a choice. Some are more difficult than others to make, but it’s a choice nevertheless.

‘I had as little choice as you had when I used your sister as my bargaining chip,’ he says quietly.

I feel light headed. ‘What happened to you, Zane?’

Something flashes into his eyes and for an unguarded instant he looks haunted. ‘I don’t want to talk about the past,’ he mutters, and starts swimming away from me.

‘Why won’t you let me in, Aleksandr Malenkov?’





Five


Aleksandr Malenkov

(Mama)



When I wake up my whole body is in so much pain I just want to huddle up and cry, but I force myself not to because Mama is lying next to me and watching. My mama is purer than a white swan. She has black hair and blue eyes like me. She is perfect except for one dark tooth and a broken jaw, which makes her mouth look ever so lightly lop-sided.

She broke her jaw when a door hit her in the face before I was born, and the tooth went dark when she fell down some steps and banged it. She told me it happened one night when she was pregnant with me. Mama said she was very lucky she did not lose the tooth or me. She said I could have fallen right out of her stomach that night. I have put my finger in mama’s mouth and I know that the dark tooth is loose. It rocks in her jaw the way my front tooth did before I pulled it out.