Tatiana arrived at JFK airport, tired after the long journey. She still had to check a flight to Port Charles.
The security measures at the airport were as strict as any checkpoint in the old Soviet Union. As to the present Russian Federation, it was an anarchy comparable to the wild west. So this new detailed attention to what she was doing brought Tatiana back into the past. She looked around, on principal, for a way to avoid inspection at the end of the line, but there seemed to be no way, so her native Russian indifference took over and she waited.
When it was her turn, the inspector looked at her passport and her visa. Then he called her aside into a room. It scared her. She hadn't seen them do this to anyone else in the line ahead of her. Did they know something about her that made them think she would try to stay? She remembered how suspicious the consul had been on that.
And yet, Tatiana wouldn't have said to herself that she intended to stay any longer than they wanted to give her.
The inspector asked her a few questions about whether she was married and whether she had relatives in the U.S. She was able to answer truthfully that she was married and that she was not related to anyone who lived in the U.S. Then, to her surprise, the inspector simply took her little white card, wrote a date on it, telling her that was the last day she could be in the U.S. Tatiana took the card. The date was surprisingly far off, in the fall, six months later. Tatiana had felt sure they'd limit her stay to a few days. Again the inspector warned her to leave by that date six months from now, or she would be forever ineligible to immigrate, or something like that.
Once out of that room, Tatiana felt a freedom she had never experienced before. Apparently, there was no one else who was going to stop her or question her. When she went to get on the plane to fly to Port Charles, there was no questioning, no inspections of documents and visas; only friendly flight attendants, treating her like she was a queen.
She took a cab to the Port Charles Hotel, which she had given the consul as her address, intending to find a cheaper hotel later, or see if her ex-husband Mikhail might put her up. She figured it would be easy to find Oksana, Mikhail's sister, the American Citizen, and that Oksana would tell her how to find Mikhail.