Chapter Three
Finally, Serenity tooka deep breath and exhaled as she explained it, “Pablo Sinclair didn’t exist forty years ago.His name was never changed legally and he has no birth certificate, either here or in Russia.”
“You’ve gone back that far?”Sergi asked softly.
She nodded.“Then I found this.”Tapping her keyboard, she changed the screen to a photo.
Sergi studied the man on the screen and frowned.He knew that face but it couldn’t be him.“This cannot be possible,” he muttered under his breath.
Nikoli snapped his gaze over to stare at him.“You know this man?”
Sergi nodded numbly.“Da, I know that face.But this man died in my arms many years ago.Such a waste.His death never made any sense to me back then as there had been an ambush.But we never knew the reason for that attack.”
“Who was he?”Felix asked quietly.
Sergi sighed hard as he looked around the room.“His name was Pavel Dmitricoff.He was the second born in a family of seven kids, he had four brothers and two sisters.His father worked at the mill and his mother worked part time as a baker to feed their large family.He and I joined the Bratva about the same time.”Sergi shook his head.“But I don’t think he could take the training.And believe me when I say the coaches were brutal back then.Some of the men just couldn’t take it and I think Pavel was one of them.He was in shape but I think they had him pushing beyond what he could accomplish.”
“What happened in this ambush?”Felix asked.
Sergi shook his head and he looked puzzled.“That’s what is so odd.I never knew why someone would ambush two people just walking down an alley.We weren’t important then.Just young aspiring men still in early training.We hadn’t even made the cut yet.And they didn’t rob us either.They just started shooting at us and it seemed at the time like they were targeting Pavel in particular.He was down on the ground and I was shooting back but after the first volley of bullets there wasn’t a second one.I dropped down and turned him over and I could see two bullet holes in his shirt.Pavel gasped and tried to talk to me but instead he just closed his eyes and I heard his breathing stop.He never opened his eyes again and I had to leave his body where it was to get some help but by the time I got back, his body wasn’t where I left it.It was just gone.We found the bloody drag marks on the cement but we never found his body.”
Serenity looked curious.“What do you suppose happened to his body?”
Sergi shrugged.“I don’t know.The Bratva never found it.”
“What about that scar on his face?”Nikoli asked.“How did that happen?”
Sergi nodded as he knew the answer to this.“That happened when he was about fourteen.He said he fell through a pane of glass in a window at his sister’s farm.But I had been aware that his brother-in-law was mean and when things didn’t go his way, he lost his temper.Let’s just say he lost his temper a lot back then.Right up until he didn’t anymore.They found his body three months later after the spring thaw.He’d gotten drunk and fell into a ditch.They had said that his head hit a rock when he fell and he died in the weather.”He shrugged.“At least that’s what I heard...all rumors, you understand.But after his death his wife, Pavel’s sister, ran the farm better than her husband ever did.I can tell you that much.
Everyone glanced at each other but no one said a word for a long moment.
Then Serenity said, “I’ll keep looking for some kind of connection between this guy and the Blue Crusaders.But so far I haven't seen one.”
Sergi nodded as he felt quite upset over this long ago past that had suddenly become part of this mystery.Troubled and distracted, he wandered off to one side as he absorbed the brutal truth.He twirled around and glared at everyone.“The whole ambush was a staged attack.Those bullets they shot at us weren’t real.They were blanks and the blood on Pavel wasn’t real either.They staged it all.
“What the hell are you saying, Sergi?”Nikoli wanted to know.
Sergi shook his head.“I never would have known.But I suddenly just remembered something.”
“What?”Felix asked.
“Pavel had two sisters and one of them was later married to Oleg Kastonovic,” Sergi explained.“Oleg had a son named Anton and he was about five years old when Pavel staged his departure from the Bratva by faking his death in that staged ambush.I am guessing that he couldn’t handle the training so he got out the only way he knew.Back then, you could not just quit the Bratva unless it was toes up.”He clenched his hands into fists.“Damn him and his laziness.He had to die in a fake ambush so he could go on to become someone else entirely.He had to be someone in the background so he could help set up the Blue Crusaders.We knew this group hated the Bratva.He worked with Anton’s father.Every action between then and now he knew he could be charged with treason against the new Russian government.He stayed in the shadows, hoping people would never see his face.If anyone knew him before, they could put the pieces together and figure out what game he was playing, he would have been ruined.”
The room remained silent as Sergi’s summation sunk in.
He turned to Serenity.“I need you to look into his father’s death.Adrik Dmitricoff.He was devastated by Pavel’s death and he blamed me for his son being gone.I don’t know why, I never even met the man but Adrik was loud and he didn’t care who heard him putting me down.He was screaming for the Bratva to shoot me for being a traitor for leaving his son to die in that alley but by then the Bratva knew what happened and because we couldn’t find his body there was no evidence he ever died.His father lived twenty years after his youngest son was killed and I avoided him for all that time but I need to know what happened after he died.That could be our connection here.”
“Connection to what exactly?”Nikoli asked as he looked puzzled.
