"Huh."
Kiriakov woke up that morning in an apartment of the neighborhood of St. George, at the north part of Staten island. The light of dawn hadn't broke already and looking at his wristwatch the Russian sighed, realizing that lately he had been sleeping less and less each day. He looked through the window of his room, gazing at the megalopolis at the other side of the bay, and his mind drifted to the memories of his homeland, not because of the sky crappers, the culture or the people, but because of the sea. Until he came to the United States of America he had never lived close to the sea and the salty breeze now and then entered the wounds that covered his body, the scars on his arms and his back, and the subsequent itch made him think why he though at the moment that he abandoned Russia, where the dry weather was only a nuisance for the fur coats that he used to own. Nevertheless, he initiated his morning routine with a cold shower and usual grooming and shaving before going to the kitchen to make some Italian coffee and after pouring a generous amount of Jack Daniels into the mug he sat in front of the piece of paper that had almost deprived him of sleep the previous night.
1) 0596-6803-43 2) 6965-5535-01
3) 5403-3571-50 4) 9406-1752-16
5) 0853-0203-92 6) 7876-3518-99
7) 2563-4286-22 8) 4126-7080-09
9) 9985-7416-70 10) 9150-6308-86
11) 1283-2511-23 12) 7245-2604-79
Funny enough the first though that crossed Kiriakov's mind when this note came from an envelop with no sender was that whoever had made it was rather careless for including a numeric key encryption, the least secure, and including so few lines for a one time pad. The second though he had was that who in the world still uses this kind of time consuming and inefficient encryption for sending coded messages. The third though was:
"Now where the f*** did I put my pad?"
The One time pad was an old encryption method used mainly during the 40s, however, Kiriakov and some comrades used it to send messages to each other during the war, not for official messages but for fooling the superiors with things such as "I've snatched some vodka, let's go drink tonight" and the like. It was too much of a coincidence that the pad he used during those days was the keepsake he chose to bring to US and thus using such pad and the key that he used the message translated to the following:
9PM40.78s-73.96535You wouldn't need to be much of a genius to see what it was referring to, the 9PM was an hour, the 40.78 was the latitude , S for stop and -7396535 was the longitude. In other words,
go at 9PM to Central Park"Huh"
And he though his stay in America was going to be boring.
He emptied the rest of the Jack Daniels into the mug, now emptied of coffee and then looked around the apartment, realizing that it was unlikely that he was going to return to it. The last drop of the whiskey tasted like honey. Kiriakov took his time to dress properly in a navy suit with a white shirt and a blue tie alongside brown shoes, he wanted to make a good impression on whoever he was going to meet, although deep inside Maximilian knew that the reason was that since he had left his job he hadn't had a chance to wear it and he wouldn't have another chance, another opportunity at being important and a way to pay respect to those years that had been erased from history. The last thing he did was grab a pistol that he had kept hidden below the bed and then he jumped out of the window.
When he was about to hit the ground, Kiriakov used his power over gravity to stop the fall and land gently as if he had only dropped ten centimeters. He raised his head and looked at the morning sun before starting to walk. And he walked and walked, not caring about getting tired or hungry, not caring about the people drifting by as if they were soulless ghost irrelevant to his life, he just walked, he walked though Staten Island, he crossed the Verrazzano bridge, he crossed Brooklyn and Manhattan, not taking the ferry, not going particularly fast, not being in a hurry or going directly to his destination. He doesn't know where he was, or if he did anything but walk and rest now and then, as if those hours had vanished just like the rest of his life without memory or trace of them.
His wristwatch marked exactly 9 in the night when he stepped into Central Park