Good Morning After Supper

By Tatyana Dickinson

This book will bring you a lot of surprises. I wrote it to explain the time from when I was born and the life in Soviet Union at that time and after I moved to this United States. Some if it is true, some what I imagine. Enjoy it and have a good time reading about my adventures!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781642145106

Book preview

Chapter 1

Do you know that bears eat dirt and grass just before they go into the hibernation period? It would prevent them from having to wake up every now and then during the winter months and take a poop.

Well, there was no dirt or grass over thirty-five thousand feet above the ground on an Air France flight from JFK to Paris.

I took Imodium after the third trip to the bathroom and hoped that it would work fast. My aisle guy gave me another annoyed look.

It was 11:00 p.m. in New York, and almost everybody on the plane was asleep.

I closed my eyes, but I had way too much on my mind to go to sleep. Events from the last week were going through my head.

When I came home Thursday from work, I found a package on my front steps. I didn’t expect any delivery. On the label was my name, so it was not something that my husband, Dave, ordered. There was no return address.

Strange . . .

I did what most people did when they didn’t know what was inside a package. I shook it, listened for ticking, and I even tried to smell around the plastic seal.

Well, if it’s a bomb it would go off already, I thought and opened the box.

What I saw in that box shocked me.

It was a dead squirrel with a note attached to the tail that said, You are the next!

Okay, I might have a list of enemies that would like me to be dead. But . . . that would not be the style that they would use to let me know that they found me.

If they wanted me dead, I would be dead . . . no squirrel attached.

That was so stupid and so childish that I didn’t even know who to consider. Maybe I pissed off somebody at work, or maybe I ran over somebody’s pet squirrel.

Who knows?

Well, I thought, whoever has a problem with me will have to stand in line to kill me.

I have to cook dinner, walk with my dog. Oh! And update my résumé!

There was a good job posting I found on the Web today for an EHS manager position in a big business, a company of good standing. Very exciting!

I am an environmental, health, and safety engineer, and currently I am working for a good industrial manufacturing company. But like with most of us, I like what I do. I just didn’t like who I was working for! The same old my boss is a jerk story, you know.

I lived with my husband and a dog in a good neighborhood in our own house in Connecticut. A new job would be the last thing I wished to change, to complete my life wish list. If I got the new job, my life would be as perfect, as good as it could get!

Well, you will always have a new wish list after you complete the old one, though.

My name is Alexandra Campbell, yes exactly like the name on soup, but everybody, including myself, calls me Alex. I took my husband’s last name because of numerous reasons but mainly to disappear from the history I got behind me.

I have been married to Dave for almost twenty-five years now.

Wow, it’s been that long?

We met in Finland where I was a teacher at a community college of agriculture . . . Sort of . . . Kind of . . .

In reality, I was a special agent of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia. But of course, like British people like to say, undercover and on a mission.

Most people would not believe that you can be a KGB agent at the age of twenty. Hell, in the United States you are not even supposed to have a drink at that age. It’s funny, but it’s not really; you are old enough to die for your country, but you are not old enough to drink! Figure that one out!

I was twenty-three when I got into the mess in old USSR that I barely survived.

I was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and grew up during the Cold War.

We had to prepare for the bad Americans to come and poison our beautiful, smooth working system with their ugly and corrupt capitalism.

That was what we were told since kindergarten. In the fifth grade we learned how to assemble and disassemble rifles and guns with our eyes closed. We learned to throw grenades, dig trenches, and play war games all the way, starting from a fifth grade through high school.

By the time American Girl Scouts mastered their ability to sell cookies to vulnerable neighbors, we learned how to protect ourselves and our motherland.

After high school I was recruited to go to Moscow Business Academy (MBA). In our graduating papers it said we had a degree in economics, but in reality it was something between the KGB and industrial espionage agents.

During that time, the Soviet Union military industrial complex employed one of every five adults. That was huge, considering the population in the CCCP! The recruitment to be a spy was for many people a full-time job. The guy we had at school who was tasked to give us advice on possibilities and opportunities gave me a good sales speech on how fun it would be to live in Moscow, how broad my future work possibilities would be, and how good the training I would get, yadda, yadda, yadda, so I signed up to go to the academy. Besides, I had nobody to ask for another advice or talk about it. Both of my parents died in an auto crash when I was fourteen.

After four years of training in war playing, I graduated as second lieutenant of medical service. If you have to put it in simple terms, I can perform like Nurse Houlihan in the M*A*S*H series on a battlefield. I also learned a lot to be a spy . . .

I was young, vigorous, and very, very lucky. I got myself in a big mess with a lot of serious people on the opposite side. Including my first husband (yes, you can be married at that age too!). I met Dave at the right moment, realized I had to get out of that mess, and two years later we got married in the United States . . .

That has allowed me to change my last name and disappear from the radar for some time. As of now, I thought I disappeared forever.

Well, it was a good wish!

Another call to the bathroom broke my mental pass through the old memories. I climbed over the aisle guy with Excuse me in every language I know. I thought he wasn’t impressed with my multilingual abilities. On the way back, I said to myself, Damn, I should have changed my seats when I was checking in and getting a boarding pass yesterday. I could probably have reserved an aisle seat. I could even have gotten upgraded to business class! Hell, I got enough Sky Miles on my American Express!

But again, I was too massed up in my head to think straight!

By the time I got back to my seat, flight attendants were turning on the lights and getting a coffee to us and breakfast. I got my tray and started analyzing what happened yesterday . . .

Chapter 2

Iwas in the shower when I heard a noise that was out of the normal house noise, like our dog Lappa’s tags dangling; or her feet scratching my hardwood floor; or her breath, hack, burp, or anything else that can come out from the Rottweiler.

I knew that Dave left to go to the store about twenty minutes ago. You couldn’t get in and out of the grocery store in twenty! He went grocery shopping every Saturday morning at 9:00 a.m. like clockwork. I could set up my watch by his daily routine schedule.

I left the bathroom door open, and I expected to be alone for a while, till it was time for the kids to come for a visit this afternoon. I couldn’t imagine them arriving that early!

My seventh sense told me that I had company. I usually trusted my seventh sense, so I turned the water off and grabbed my towel and my gun.

Shit, I left my glasses on the sink counter! Usually I had my contact lenses in, and usually my gun was in the bedroom nightstand, not in the shower. But that dead squirrel in the mail yesterday got me a little worried. Better be overprepared than sorry! I took my gun with me to the shower this morning, just in case.

I mentally slapped myself and opened the shower curtain. There was nobody at the door, at least as far as I could see.

I’m telling you, without glasses, it’s not too far!

I got out of the bathtub and went for my glasses.

With my peripheral vision I saw some movement at the door. It’s hard to put glasses on, hold the towel, and point the