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It was revenge 10 years in the making. 10 long years he had spent in prison planning, waiting for the day he got to show his lawyer what it is like just sitting there in your cell, nothing to do but wait. Outside the cell people wanted him beat up, raped or worse. His lawyer deserved twice the ten years for incompetence and everything it had cost.
Jason would be 38 the day after his release next week. No parole, he had served every day of his sentence. His attitude left him with no good time at all. Now he was just another ex-con with almost no chance of getting back into a high paying gig on Wall Street. He would be lucky to get a job cleaning the offices he used to work in. Not with his record.
10 years of the humiliation and degradation of prison life. The violence, the sex, living on the edge every minute making sure you don’t turn your back on your enemies, or get in the middle of somebody else’s business. The lousy food, miserable living conditions but worst of all Jason hated the isolation. 23 hours a day in a 6 by 9 foot cell. Isolation.Solitary. Quiet. More attitude by Jason, and the cycle started over. No one in the prison would miss him, guard or con.
It was his lawyer who told him to cut a deal with the feds and take his chances. Take the deal he said, they will go lighter on you, stock manipulation is not popular today; give yourself the best chance he said. Jason got ten years, his boss got 20, their boss has not been seen since the scandal broke, and now almost every dime he made was gone, spent on his lawyer, the trial and the fine. Not to mention his IRS problems.
His former workers and friends think he either destroyed their careers or ratted them out. His boss had to be moved to another prison to avoid having Jason killed as a favor. The family members, in-laws and friends who invested and lost it all now hated him. His wife got a divorce and was now re-married.
To Jason, it was all his lawyers fault. He cooperated. Sentenced to 10 years of nothing to do but read or stare at the ceiling or read some more. All because he listened to his lawyer.
He never should have thrown his lawyers briefcase at the judge during sentencing. Or elbow that guard in the face. Originally he was to only do three of the ten years but his temper and actions kept him in for the full package. But now he was about to be released and the first thing, the only thing, he wanted was revenge.
The idea came to him when talking to the guy in the next cell during exercise. His neighbor told him about his crazy uncle who had just died. He was paranoid as hell during the cold war and built a bomb shelter under the mobile home he lived in, by himself, convinced the war was coming. They used it as a hideout for his two years on the most wanted list. The feds had searched the property and didn’t find him. But he got tired of the isolation and was caught drunk in Vegas and was now doing life.
His uncle died living in that isolated trailer on the edge of nowhere. It had no electricity and the only water was a hidden well. The shelter had ventilation and some natural light through a shaft. It was small but designed for long term residence. The shelter was secure, isolated with no neighbors for miles and an hour’s ride to the nearest town.
Last he heard the county would have sold it for the taxes, but had no takers. It was in a worthless corner of California in the high desert and you needed to know where you were going to find it. He told Jason right where to turn. He could tell by the overgrowth that no one had been there since the uncle died.
It was perfect. A cold, gray concrete prison buried in a hill. Better, it was a tomb. No one knew about the well on the property and that kept the price down. Jason had liquidated all of his assets when he was arrested and was able to hide a small amount to start his new life. But revenge came first. He bought the land. No one at the county knew about the shelter or the well.
It was easy to attach a lock to the outside of the steel door. It had a small window in the door that could open or shut to look outside, but too small for much of anything. The vents were very well hidden; it looked like an abandoned trailer in the middle of nowhere. Even then you had to find the trap door and go down the ladder. No one would ever find it. His uncle might have been crazy but he knew how to build a hidden shelter.
There was not much in the three small rooms. One had a water pump, a very primitive toilet in the corner and an old army cot. The center room had a small table, a chair and a bookcase against the wall. The last room had freeze dried food stacked in cases, almost filling the room. Jason removed anything that looked like a tool or a weapon.
Inescapable. His lawyer could live out the rest of his life in this hole and no one would know but Jason.
Jason waited patiently in the parking garage that night until the attorney prepared to leave. One large blast of pepper spray to the face, some duct tape to the mouth, wrist and ankles, a quick struggle and he was in the trunk of his car. Jason drove calmly to the shelter listening to his lawyer struggle.
It was a long drive and Jason would periodically pull over at a secluded spot to give the attorney water. Each dose had a stronger and stronger dose of sedatives. By the time they reached the trailer his attorney was sound asleep and easy to move. He used a rope to lower him down the shaft to the steel door and pulled him inside, cut the tape, tossed some cold water in the lawyers face, stepped outside and padlocked the door shut.
It took almost an hour for the attorney to come to his senses. Jason watch amusedly through the door as his lawyer tried to find another way out.
“This is what you get for destroying my life. I spent ten long years in hell for listening to you, now you will see what it’s like. You are miles from nowhere in an old bomb shelter. Consider it your retirement cottage. Maybe in ten years I will think different, but I doubt it.”
“You have enough food and water to last you twenty years, more if you stretch it. Light isn’t too good, but you can get a couple of hours of reading a day. A lot of books and magazines here. Not much variety, you might have to read them each three or four times.”
“I have to go now, have a job interview in LA. Working as an assistant bookkeeper at $1700 dollars a month. I used to spend that in a restaurant in a night, no thanks to you. I will be back in a month to check on your new life style. Maybe anyway. Maybe not, it doesn’t matter to you, this is your whole world now.”
“I made some contacts in prison, none of them good. I know a guy who will pay me $10000 for your car that means after paying the taxes on this place I have already made $5000 since I’ve been out. Maybe I haven’t lost the touch.”
Jason hated the job but had no choice at the moment. His sentence was over but the IRS wanted money. And he could not show his hidden loot, they would take that in a second. So day after day he sat in the cubicle smiling at the thought of his lawyer sitting at that empty table trying to use a plastic spoon to dig through his cement prison walls. It was the happiest he had been in the two months since his release as he drove back up to the ‘prison’.
Jason slid the window back to look inside the shelter. He was expecting to see a pleading lawyer, begging to get out. He was even ready to see his lawyer lying dead from suicide or something. What he saw was a stack of money and coins on the table with the bookshelf turned away from the wall. There was a large hole behind the bookcase. His lawyer was no place to be seen. Jason unlocked the door and carefully walked in.
No attorney.
Under the stack of $100 bills and gold coins on the table there was a note:
Dear Jason,
I am guessing you did not know about the tunnel. I found it on the second day. I further surmise you did not know about the money, a small sample of which is on the table.
There is at least $50k in cash and who knows how much the gold coins are worth, at least that much. I took half, let’s call it a finder’s fee. A little something for my trouble seems fair.
The rest is yours. I would call the police but I do not want to spend the rest of my life looking behind me for some guy that owes you a favor. And you do not want to go back to prison. Take the money and with luck, we will never see or hear from each other again.
Ron
P.S. Make sure you bring the emergency candle, easy to trip down there moving the money.
Jason stared down the shaft. His lawyer had left a bucket on a rope made of his sheets next to the shaft. Jason lowered a lit candle. The shaft went down about ten feet and had a wooden ladder built into the wall. At the bottom of the shaft there was another tunnel leading away from the trailer. He could see some coins on the floor.
The tunnel was only five feet high and not easy to walk in. It went about 20 feet, made one right turn, and then suddenly ended. A note was stuck to the wall.
Jason,
He never finished the tunnel. That sound you hear is me dragging the money out the door and locking it behind me. You cannot get there in time. I have been hiding behind the boxes in the store room. The part about the money is true enough. I will be back in a month. Maybe.
Ron
Jason fell twice trying to get back to the ladder. As he finally reached the bottom he could hear the door slamming shut and the sound of the lock behind it. By the time Jason reached the door he could see a rope pulling up two large canvas sacks. All his screaming went for naught. He was locked in his own prison.
He started quivering. It was not so much the lawyers escape as it was the instant quiet. That is what terrified him, just like solitary. No cell doors, no guards, no one else talking. No toilets flushing, no noise at all.
He pulled every box out of the small room but there was nothing, no way out. The door was solid and nothing to dig through rock with. All he had was the quiet and time. Plenty of both He would rather be back in prison.
And the not knowing. What would the attorney do? As the time dragged on the police were less of a concern, they would have been there by now. Leave him there? That was his scariest thought. Buried alive in the terrible quiet. Prison taught him how to handle the panic but he had almost cracked in solitary. And now that was all he had.
He was on the cot when the window in the door opened. Jason sprung to the door. There was a large Russian man with a heavy accent. “You alive, ready to leave? Wait until I am at top.” With that he unlocked the door and climbed up the ladder. Jason followed, anything was better than being stuck down there.
Two men grabbed him as he came up the ladder and dragged him outside. An SUV and windowless van were parked outside, and his attorney was getting out of the SUV.
“Jason, how was your stay? I would like you to meet Vladov.”
“Fuck you.” Jason moved quickly, but not quickly enough. He soon had his hands cuffed behind his back. Another man got out of the SUV with a computer. After staring at Jason for about five minutes he called the attorney over. They nodded and walked back to Jason. Vladov pulled two cards from his pocket, took Jason’s fingerprints on each card and walked back to the back of the SUV. Three minutes later he came back with some documents.
The lawyer took the documents and then at Jason.
“First of all your Ponzi scheme was already imploding. You were inept at hiding your crimes and still could have walked in three. But you just had to be an asshole to every one and you paid the price. I did a great job for you, you are the one who screwed it up.”
“Anyway, congratulations, you are now Lazar Ivanov, of Sangar, Russia.”
“Fuck you.”
“Always true to form Jas..,” he stared down at the documents “ I mean Lazar.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Who the fuck are these guys? What are you going to do to me?”
‘”So many questions. I could not let you go; you would probably kill me after that tunnel trick. Pretty good huh? Anyway if you go back to the slam I have to figure I get a knife in the ribs some day from a just released boyfriend of yours. And I can’t leave you to rot down there, although I was tempted, but my finger prints were everywhere in case you were ever found. “
“Then I remembered Vladov, a former client. He supplies people with credentials, and sometimes people with people. As it turns out he has a client in Sangar, a lovely little place just above the Arctic Circle, about 150 miles north of Yakutsk. Yakutsk is famous as the coldest city on earth. Averages 40 below zero in the long, long winter.Sangar is not like the big city though, much smaller, quieter, much more remote. They actually have a working diamond mine there in the permafrost. You will be replacing one Lazar Ivanov who died in an unreported mining accident. It is not that they feel bad for him, but even in Russia they have paperwork and Lazar owed money to the mine’s owner. We just hacked the system, replaced his fingerprints with yours and voila, you are now Lazar Ivanov.”
“Bullshit. They have my fingerprints here. That shit won’t work.”
“In the US you are absolutely correct. You, however, will be in Russia with no money, you can’t speak the language, with only Russian documents saying you are Lazar Ivanov. Lazar had 9 years remaining on his contract with the mine owner, you will finish that. You even look so much like him, we will not even change the picture. There are barely any roads, or phones or public transportation or anything resembling civilization, isn’t that right Vlad?”
“Yes, very isolated. Very cold. In winter no ships or busses, no cars. No phones. Work very hard and dangerous, not pay much, just enough to buy vodka. You will need much vodka.”
“These nice gentleman will take you to the Port of Seattle, put you in a shipping container, get you loaded on a boat and you will be in Sangar for the summer thaw.”
“Fuck you, they can’t keep me there. I’ll be back here as soon as I get free.” The two Russians held him tight as one shoved a rag in his mouth.
Much better you stay quiet for a while. Down in the mine you can scream all you want. Sangar is very far away from anyplace, you not difficult to find. If you leave before contract you will be arrested and returned. So you don’t try again they chain you to mine car. The mine owner is well connected, if you try to break contract gain you will go to prison. Prisons not nice in Russia like they are here. You will not like. Lazar already had record, your next sentence very long one. Then you still finish contract. Easier for you to finish contract with no prison. When contract is up, you sign a new one because you have no money. No money, no place to live, no food, no travel papers. In Russia no travel papers and no money means you stay where you are.” Vladov was smiling. “You will make a good Russian.”
“This is why revenge is such a bad idea Lazar. You wasted all that time in prison planning my misery and now it is you who will be begging to go back to your nice warm cell. I know you still had some cash stashed , you could have been free. Hell, now you are all but a slave, practically the property of a rich Russian mine owner. The only thing I am certain of is your revenge landed on the right person, you caused all your own problems.”
“By the way Jason, I’m sorry… Lazar, some of those coins were quite rare, I should clear almost half a million by the time it is all sold. Thanks Lazar, enjoy your new life.”
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