Upon consideration, it could be that all these people with their various axes to grind are plotting against us together.
Sweetness asks, “We have all these powerful people lined up against us. What have we got to work with?”
I lie back on the couch with a couple pillows under my head and work it through. I was duped into a black op under the belief that its primary mandate would be to save women from being forced into prostitution. The op was self-funded, and we robbed the dope dealers of Helsinki blind to acquire those funds.
The true purpose was fundraising for the National Coalition Party, the party of the rich, and for Real Finns, a populist movement with an often incomprehensible agenda that changed almost daily. They did, however, manage to drain supporters from other, more centrist parties, allowing the NCP to win. The Real Finns garnered enough votes to take part in government, but because of their wilder policy positions, such as withdrawal from the European Union and a return to our old currency, the Finnish markka, were dismissed out of hand. They declared themselves an opposition party, and the NCP victory was complete.
However, in the event that the election didn’t work out as planned, I was given the job of collecting dirt on the Real Finns’ hierarchy and that of other parties as well, so they could be destroyed by scandal if necessary. Sweetness did the initial surveillance and proved to have a knack for recording people in the most compromising positions, but I needed him for other things. I decided to cover my ass and didn’t just collect skank on NCP competition. I hired Finland’s premier filth-monger, Jaakko Pahkala, a so-called journalist who freelances for all the skank rags, to surveil the NCP as well. I have something on almost everybody, except those who have nothing to hide, and there are few enough of those about.
And on the interior minister and the national chief of police, I have something special. Sperm samples, currently residing in Milo’s freezer, that connect them to the Filippov murder. They thought, pompous fools that they are, that they were so irresistible that Ivan Filippov’s mistress just couldn’t help herself and had to perform fellatio on them. She was collecting DNA to frame them for murder, though she ended up being the victim herself.
There were four samples, unmarked. Theirs, and those of two other crooked politicians I have yet to identify. Cigarette butts and their attendant DNA, the bane of the criminal. I scooped them up earlier in the summer while we were socializing with the rich and powerful aboard the minister of interior’s yacht. They even had the courtesy to smoke different brands and make it easy for me to identify them later. I knew which samples belonged to who. Offenders really shouldn’t smoke. I sent them off with the sperm samples to a private genetics testing lab.
The chief, Jyri Ivalo, tried to cover up the Filippov murder because he’d had an affair with the victim. In addition to the sperm, I also have a video of the chief engaging in a fetishistic sex act with her. Making the video public would have humiliated him and ended his career. I saw no need for that and suppressed the evidence involving him. Ivalo made me an offer to run a self-funded black-ops unit mandated to use illegal means to fight crime. Ivalo cited human trafficking as their primary target.
It soon became clear though, that Jyri Ivalo was disingenuous concerning the black op. Although I could fight human trafficking if I wished, Ivalo’s main objective was stealing from criminals not only for political fundraising but also personal enrichment. Further, the minister of the interior, who among his many other duties oversees the secret police, SUPO, was in league with him. They insisted that I and my accomplices accept a percentage of the money we stole. They left me no choice. If I wasn’t complicit, I wasn’t trustworthy. Their ax over my head: my wife isn’t a Finnish citizen. They would have her deported. I was stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place.
Flying his sex tape on YouTube would not only make him a laughingstock and destroy his career, but force the reopening of the Filippov case and possibly land him in prison. And now, it appears, he’s involved in threatening my family and placing them in danger. His gratitude for suppressing this evidence appears short- lived.
“Skank,” I say.
“Skank?” Sweetness repeats.
“The pix you and Jaakko Pahkala took of politicians taking bribes and having extramarital and/or homosexual liaisons. The material I’ve been paying to collect for months. It’s career-destroying material, and it was collected without regard to political party affiliation. It’s a powerful weapon in our small arsenal.”
“Where is it?”
“In Internet cloud space. Pahkala uploaded it to one account. Milo moved it to another, more secure account and shared the user name and password with me. We memorized it. There’s no written record that it exists.”
The flask reappears. My two underlings: a drunk and a stoner. Who could ask for anything more. “Killing us would eliminate that threat,” Sweetness says.
Yep. I try to think who I could trust to release the skank in the event of our deaths to create a tangible blackmail threat. Only one name comes to mind. Jari, my brother. I’ll write him a letter with the user name and password to get to the skank and elucidate.
“I can make that difficult for them,” I say. “I just need to have another little chat with Jyri Ivalo and explain the situation. And besides, they could have done that already. They want us alive until we give the ten million back.”
“Should we use it to bargain our way out of trouble, then give it back?”
“No. We’re in the kind of trouble no bargaining will cure. Not over the long haul.”
“Then what’s the plan?”
“Kate will be home soon.” I say it with confidence but offer a silent prayer that Milo can really make it happen. “I want this over before she arrives. And Loviise Tamm’s future is on a tight time frame as well. If it hasn’t happened already, odds are good that what they have in mind for her will psychologically and emotionally devastate her, probably for life.”
I say another silent prayer that she hasn’t been fed to the sharks yet and forced into prostitution. Girls in her position are broken in by being raped and beaten over and over until they just give up and do what they’re told. “We start the search for Loviise this evening.”
“It’s a big city. How?”
I’m suddenly exhausted again. “I’m going to take a nap. I’ll let you know when I wake up.” I wash the gop off the teeth in the lion’s head of my cane, oil them so they don’t rust, and lie down in bed.
Sleep doesn’t come. Images flicker through my mind like a slide show. A tear gas canister blowing out my window. Kate blowing Adrien Moreau in half with a sawed-off shotgun. The bodies of little children his accomplices left in shallow graves. Sweetness destroying the biker’s knee. The sound of it. He’ll never walk on it again. Instead, like me, he’ll drag his leg around for life. So much violence. I went into self-imposed isolation to avoid it. Or rather, after understanding just how volatile I’ve become, to avoid hurting others. My emotional state is fragile. I’m unpredictable. I don’t want to be. I want to move on from all this ugliness.
The past won’t let me be. I have to sleep. I tire easily and may be in for a long night of police work, or some facsimile of it. I dry-swallow a couple pills and wait for them to knock me out, but my mind keeps churning and turns, as it so often does, to Kate.
13
I roll out of bed at six p.m. I slept all day after sleeping fifteen hours last night. I tell myself it’s because I tire easily and we have a long night ahead of us, but I know damned well sleeping near round the clock is a sign of depression. Milo said I’m in “shock.” I don’t know, maybe I am. I don’t much care.
The girls are sitting side by side at the dining room table, somber, speaking sotto voce. Sweetness is sitting on the floor in front of the TV, playing the video game Grand Theft Auto. With our watchers incapacitated and the message sent, I think my apartment is safe, at least for now.
Some burgers are in a pan on the stove. We have no bread in the house because Jenna and Sweetness are avoiding the dreaded carbohydrates that would turn them into slobbering fat monsters. I add some salt and eat two with my fingers. I ask Sweetness, “Ready to roll?”
