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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — The most powerful men in the world met this week in Alaska. But it may have been a chance encounter in the parking lot of a local thrift store that put one man at the center of global events.

The retiree, Mark Warren, is a former fire inspector with the Municipality of Anchorage who rode away with a new motorcycle from a delegation that accompanied Russian President Vladimir Putin to the summit with President Donald Trump in Anchorage. The Russian government gift was a Ural Gear Up motorcycle with a sidecar.

Warren didn’t think anything of it when the Russian television crew stopped and interviewed him while he rode his old motorcycle to run errands. But the interview went viral in Russia, and an offer for a new bike followed.

“I didn’t expect it at all,” said Warren, who thought at first that he was the victim of an elaborate scam. “Free motorcycle? No, that’s not normal.”

It wasn’t until the three-hour summit on Saturday at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, which ended with both leaders flying out of Alaska without a joint news conference or signing of agreements, that he thought it might be true. A day after the interview, the Russian journalist who had interviewed him first in the parking lot called to say the motorcycle had arrived in Anchorage.

All he had to do was pick it up.

On a Sunday, Warren and his wife followed instructions to show up at a local hotel. In the parking lot were the gleaming olive-green Ural Gear Up and a group of six men he assumed were Russians waiting for him.

“I dropped my jaw,” Warren said. “I went, ‘You’ve got to be joking me.’”

The Russians only wanted a photo and another interview in exchange for the motorcycle and some video of him riding around in the parking lot. Warren agreed. After the cameraman latched onto the back of the motorcycle and a couple of reporters and a man from the Russian consulate jumped into the sidecar, he drove a slow circle around the lot.

Even then, he hesitated.

Warren doesn’t know if it’s proper to accept a gift from a foreign government and was reluctant to do so.

“The only reservation I had is that I might somehow be implicated in some nefarious Russian scheme,” he said. “I don’t want a bunch of haters coming after me because I got a Russian motorcycle. … I don’t want this for my family.”

He declined to answer questions about what he said to the journalist and the journalists that day he was interviewed. He also would not reveal which video outlet published the interview. Warren said he signed only one document, to take ownership of the motorcycle from the Russian Embassy. The document confirmed the obvious: The bike had been manufactured on August 12.

“The obvious thing here is that it rolled off the showroom floor and slid into a jet within probably 24 hours,” he said.

Warren said he appreciates the gift but was surprised by the cost of the motorcycle, which is worth $22,000. He already owned a Ural, a second-hand bike that he bought from a neighbor. But he said it’s difficult to keep it running because parts are scarce and demand is greater than supply.

“It went viral, it went crazy, and I have no idea why, because I’m just a super-duper normal guy,” Warren said in an interview on Tuesday. “They just interviewed some old guy on a Ural, and for some reason they think it’s cool.”

Warren is originally from Pittsburgh and was a U.S. Navy veteran before he began his career in fire inspection, he said.

Ural motorcycles are manufactured in Petropavlovsk in Kazakhstan, by workers who once built motorcycles in Siberia. Founded in western Siberia in 1941, Ural now assembles the motorcycle in Petropavlovsk. The company’s distributors in the United States are a team in Woodinville, Washington.