I wish I could preface my answer with the absolute truth. After I make the people in my world safe again, I will return to honesty and abide by the law. “If I decide to be a cop again. I’m tired. I’m shot to pieces. I’m mentally and emotionally worn down. I may retire.”
“I’m done advising you. Do what you think best for yourself. Have I done such terrible things?”
“No.”
“Do you still love me?”
“Heart and soul.”
“Can we be a family again?”
“That’s my greatest wish.”
She scoots over and lays her head on my shoulder. “Good.” Within minutes, she’s asleep there, in an old and familiar position. It seems like centuries have passed since she slept there, and having her there again, I feel those years fall away from me in a kind of spiritual rebirth.
37
I step off the dock into Milo’s boat at five thirty a.m. He’s already up, slurping coffee and dictating into a microphone. Judging by his eyes, he’s had a wake and bake. I pick up the hashish pipe next to his computer. It’s pungent, freshly used. Its warmth and smell confirm it.
“So where are we off to?” I ask.
“Let me show you something first. Sweetness and I didn’t really go out drinking last night.”
He leads me to the other cabin and pulls a tarp away to reveal a gun safe lying on its back. The lock is gone, drilled out. I comment on it. Milo sighs. “Like everything, lock picking is hard for me just using my left hand. This belonged to the good major. Sweetness and I B amp;Eed him and boosted it. It’s made of cheap metal and not that heavy, so we just hoisted it up and carried it out to the Jeep on our shoulders.”
He flips open the door. “A.50 cal Barrett, two assault rifles, and a small assortment of handguns. Another step in the plan accomplished.”
We go to the kitchenette and he pours me a cup of coffee. He takes some gun parts out from the cabinet he keeps cups in.
“Have you learned how to fieldstrip your Colt?” he asks.
I had so little to do when I was sitting home alone, and had promised myself that I would learn to shoot, so I practiced until I could do it with my eyes closed. “Yeah, I learned.”
He hands me a barrel and firing pin. “After you kill Pitkanen, the first thing you do is replace the ones in your Colt with these and fire it a couple times. That way, the rifling and pin mark on the brass will clear you if you’re caught. Just tell the truth and explain that you’ve been practicing marksmanship, and it will explain the powder residue on the gun and your hands.”
He seems to have thought of everything. “How are you going to get Roope Malinen out to his summer cottage where you can kill him after his frame-up rampage?”
“What happened to the less you know, the less you have to do theory? The more you know, the more culpable you are.”
“I’m already culpable.”
“We’re not sure yet. Either entice him out there with a phony meeting he believes has to be held in private, or just abduct his sorry ass and force him there. That doesn’t concern me as much as making certain his family isn’t there. He has to go there alone in order to commit suicide after his atrocities. Sweetness will attend to that part of things.”
“Have you got a Go Day yet?”
“Not yet. Soon.”
“I’ve got another aspect to it that might deflect some media attention. All those girls in the apartments owned or rented by Russian diplomats. Raiding them and freeing them on or around the same day seems like a good idea. Every day that goes by, those girls suffer, so if you’re bent on doing this, do it soon. We release the info on the girls forced into the slave trade, it has to be dealt with immediately. It will create havoc in the police department, among the media, everywhere, just overload them all with more than they’re able to deal with efficiently.”
“A good idea,” Milo says. “I’ll get this together as fast as I can.”
I ask nothing more for now. Lying to myself about not taking part in an event that will change history is the ultimate in self-deception.
Milo pilots, I fish. By the time we’ve reached his uninhabited island destination, I’ve got a pretty good catch: some nice salmon, perch and pike.
There are actually two islands, a little less than a kilometer apart. Milo chose this spot so he can practice with his sniper rig, shooting from one to the next. Vegetation is sparse on both of them, but there are a few trees he can shoot at long distance.
He says we’re going to learn to shoot pistols the way Adrien Moreau taught us. No using the back sight. Just using the front sight, as if pointing with our index fingers. We shoot at smaller things and from farther away as we get the hang of it. We practice only with silencers, because we’re not training to be cops at the moment, we’re studying to be assassins.
We start with a garbage can lid at fifteen paces. I have to hold a cane in my left hand, so we decide I should turn sideways, like an old-fashioned dueler, to make a thinner target. He tries facing forward, with his damaged right hand supporting his left, but he says it hurts like hell when the pistol goes off. He has to stop that method and tries standing sideways, like me, and shooting one-handed.
This goes better. At first, we’re just sort of waving our pistols around, and if we hit the trash can lid at all, it’s near the outside perimeter. But after we burn up about a thousand rounds, we start to get the hang of it and at least hit the lid with consistency.
Milo lies down and tries out the Barrett. He picks a tree on the other island. The correct method is to apply equal pressure across the trigger with the index finger, slowly, so not even the shooter knows when the rifle will discharge. His index finger won’t do this, so he puts the tip of his finger on the trigger and fires by slowly pulling his whole arm backward. Not only does he miss the tree entirely, but the recoil, akin to that of a cannon, jars his damaged wrist so badly that he screams.
He rolls over and tries the process as if he were left-handed, which means he peers through the scope with his left eye. Since he’s right-eyed, this proves difficult. At first, he misses the tree again, but after a few rounds his eye adjusts, and he can’t shoot any kind of group, but can at least hit the tree.
When we’re done, I tell him that we’re a couple of buffoons with these weapons and there’s no way we can pull this off. I ask him where he intends to shoot from when he assassinates Veikko Saukko. “From the boat,” he says.
I start to laugh.
He gets furious. “And what is so fucking funny about that?”
“You can’t even hit a fucking tree lying down, and you think you’re going to hit a moving target from a rocking boat. It’s fucking ludicrous.”
His face twists into something like hatred, and it makes me laugh all the more.
He forces himself to stay calm, to maintain his dignity. “I have to go to Helsinki to pick up something I mail-ordered. And tomorrow, you insignificant fuck, I will show you how I’m going to blow his brains out, from a boat, and from several hundred meters away.”
“Cool,” I say, “I’ll look forward to it.”
We start back to my place. I catch a couple more fish while he sulks.
38
Back at home, the others are just waking. I show off my catch of the day. Kate wrinkles her nose at it. Like many people not accustomed to country living, hunting or fishing, she prefers such foods from the grocery store, in Styrofoam and plastic wrap. I clean them, put a couple in the fridge for dinner and the others in the freezer chest. To my surprise and delight, I open the lid and find the freezer full of game meat, from rabbits to moose roasts, and vegetables that Arvid and Ritva must have grown last year. Kate doesn’t know how to cook game, but I do. It will save a fortune in restaurant bills and give me a pleasurable task to fill my time.
Sweetness tells me that he’s had a talk with Jenna. She’s bored and wants to go back to Helsinki. He doesn’t say it, but I can see he wants to go, too.
“The thing is,” he
says, “you can’t drive. Kate needs to go to her therapy. You need help carrying things and to go places, like the doctor, once in a while. I don’t want to leave you in the lurch. You want me to take Jenna to town and then come back here?”
I mull it over. Young love. He’ll pine and drink even more without her here. I think they’re mostly unhappy because with Mirjami gone and Kate back, the dynamic has changed. We’re not living in party central anymore. The people who want us dead have other things to contend with at the moment. Only Jan Pitkanen remains an unknown quantity. Saukko could bring in a killer, but bullets will kill us just as dead in Porvoo as in Helsinki. And with Milo living on his boat, Kate and I would be here more or less alone. We’re relatively safe and need that alone time as a family.
“Kate can drive,” I say, “and she’s in pretty good shape now. We’ll rent a car. Go back to Helsinki and have some fun. If we need anything, I’ll call. Thank you for all you’ve done for us.”
He nods and smiles, I imagine relieved that he doesn’t have to force Jenna to make a choice between going to Helsinki alone, unable to spend every waking moment with him, or staying here with people twice her age or more and boring her to tears. “I’ll drop you at a rental place on the way,” he says.
They go to pack. I tell Kate they’re leaving. She doesn’t say she’s glad, but it’s obvious. She just went off a binge drunk, and watching them get sloshed every night, even if it doesn’t make her want to join them, may be conjuring up some bad memories for her.
Ace detective that I am, as Yelena Merkulova pointed out, surely I can find Natasha Polyanova. With the investigative prowess of Sherlock Holmes, I Google “Russian trade delegation” and “rental properties,” and it pops right up. They have an office in Eira. Her e-mail address and business phone number are on the website.
Sweetness comes downstairs to grab a beer, and I ask him if he still has all that cash he won cheating at poker. Mirjami never had the chance to take it.
“Yeah,” he says, “it’s in a paper bag in my backpack. Why?”
“You mind if I borrow a quarter million? I’ll transfer it back from my offshore account to yours.”
He pops the top of his beer with Kate’s new reindeer antler bottle opener. “Sure. What for?”
“Bribes. I don’t even know if I really need it.”
He brings it to me, I toss it in a desk drawer, and we go to rent a car. Sweetness and Jenna drop us off at the agency on their way. Kate asks what we should get.
I sweep my arm in a semicircle. “This car lot is your oyster.” I see her eyeing a new Mercedes SL convertible. I point at it. “I like that one.”
“It will cost a fortune.”
I shrug. “So? We’ll lease it. Drive in style to your heart’s content.”
She looks at me, appraising. “You’re rich now, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, but I won’t be for long. I like to throw money around and I waste too much of it. Enjoy it while you can.” This is true. I never give a damn about money unless I don’t have any. My own tastes are expensive, but my wants are few. My salary sufficient. Despite my childhood poverty, money isn’t high on my list of priorities. We drive away in the Mercedes.
That evening, we have our first family dinner in months. Kate keeps me company while I cook. Fresh perch in a chanterelle sauce. The mushrooms doubtless gathered in the local forest. New potatoes, sweet and no bigger than my thumbs. I take an excellent chardonnay from Arvid’s extensive collection of wine and spirits. The sun is strong outside, but I light candles for ambiance. We don’t talk about illness or crimes, sins or forgiveness. I’m happy. I don’t remember the last time I could say that.
• • •
MILO AND I continue our faux morning fishing. He’s still miffed, but at least speaking to me. We approach the islands where we took target practice the day before, he cuts the engine, drops anchor and starts putting things together. A box, some sort of electronic gadget, is on the bottom, then a sheet of plywood, then a small folding boat chair with a cloth seat and backrest, then a tripod with flexible legs. He curves each leg so that they’re all on the plywood, but its head is over and to the left of the chair, over the armrest. He screws a Y-shaped mount onto the tripod. It resembles a vise, with two sets of pincers a couple feet apart. He lays the Barrett on it and tightens it, locks it into place.
He pushes the gun around with one finger, to make sure the tripod head allows for fluid movement, both vertically and horizontally. “Sit and look,” he says.
He set it up for his height, so I have to hunch over to see through the scope. The boat is rocking, but the gun isn’t. It’s as steady as if we were on solid ground. He’s built a stable gun turret. He surprises me sometimes, but this falls just short of amazing. “How in the hell did you do that?” I ask.
“The same way you watch TV on a boat. Ever wonder how the dish stays focused on the satellite so it’s possible? It’s done with a fiber-optic gyroscope. Two laser beams are fired through the same fiber in opposite directions. The beam traveling against the rotation has a shorter path delay than the other beam. The differential phase shift is calculated, translating one part of the angular velocity into a shift of the interference pattern, which is measured. It provides precise rotational rate information, largely because of its lack of sensitivity to shock, vibration or acceleration. It has no moving parts and doesn’t rely on inertial resistance. They’re so reliable that NASA uses them in space projects.”
“Jesus, this must have cost a fortune.”
“Actually, no. I put this together for very little money.”
I stand up. “Let’s see it work.”
He sits down. “I’ll be a little off, because my stock-to-cheek weld is a little different in this position, but I can prove the point. The big advantage is that I can just close my right eye and barely touch the rifle with anything except my index finger.”
He fires three rounds, examines his marksmanship through the scope and smiles. “Check it out.”
I have a look. The three bullets are in a six-inch group. “OK,” I say. “I take back what I said and I shouldn’t have laughed at you. This is brilliant.”
“I didn’t invent the idea. Fiber-optic gyroscopes have been used in fire-control systems for a long time, but apology accepted. Go fish or something. I need to sight in the rifle I stole from the good major and make sure it’s worth a shit.”
Our pistol practice goes better today. Milo brought disposable pie tins to shoot at, and we hit them at least most of the time from fifteen paces. We go through a thousand rounds again. Today, he asks me to shoot a video of him. He puts on a white paper crime scene suit to keep his DNA from getting on the outer clothing, then puts on camouflage fatigues and a balaclava. We adjust his clothing to hide the white underneath.
“Look at me. Is there anything to give away my identity?” he asks.
I give him a once-over. “Your hand and wrist brace.”
“Fuck, I forgot. I’ve got the shit I stole from Malinen.” He takes off his hand brace, slips on a class ring, a watch and a scarf. Subtle and masterful, I think. Small things people forget when disguising themselves.
I make a film for YouTube as he fires the guns he stole from the major: the Barrett-he forces himself not to wince-the automatic rifles and a couple semi-auto pistols. He has to do all this right-handed, and it’s hurting him badly. The balaclava masks his pain. I wish another one of us could have done this. Unfortunately, it has to be him because he’s about the same size as Roope Malinen, and both Sweetness and I are much too big to be believable in the role.
We start packing up to go, and he sighs. “Shooting left-handed just feels so fucking unnatural.”
I start to make a joke about jerking off with his left hand, but don’t.
He shakes his head, despondent and dejected. I know how he feels, it’s hard to be a crip. I’ve just been one for much longer than he has and am used to it. I don’t offer solace. Everything feels unnatural. There’s n
othing to say.
On the ride back, I ask him if he thinks he can pick a lock and do a B amp;E with me.
“What for?”
“The Russian trade delegation rental office. The girls they use as prostitutes live and work in apartments run by them. It’s possible they keep all the girls’ passports there, too. Best-case scenario: We find the passports, or maybe their identities are on file, either on paper or in an office computer. We find the names of who is in charge of what, just unravel everything and shut down their operation.”
“I don’t know if I can do it with my lock pick set, but with an electronic pick gun, yeah, we can get in.”
I’ve always wondered how Milo manages to hack anything and everything. “And their computers?”
“Computers are odd little beasts. First, most people don’t bother to password-protect their computers. When they do, they usually use a predictable password, so it pays to learn a little about the owner. Their birthdays. The names of their kids and pets. If the passwords are random they’re hard to remember, and people often write them down and stick them under their mouse pads or somewhere in the area of the computer. Some computers have default passwords. Some have slots almost never used, for multimedia cards, memory cards, picture cards. I insert one with a virus and it goes unseen. People don’t notice when you look over their shoulders as they open their computers. And if all those simple tricks don’t work, there are more time-consuming ways to get it. Mostly, though, it’s just through people’s stupidity.”
“My idea is that the day before you carry out the assassinations, we take the info we’ve gathered there, send it to the police and all the newspapers, and while you’re doing your thing, half the force is busy making raids and arrests.”
He nods. “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Let’s do that tomorrow instead of coming out here.”
My phone rings. It’s Ai. “You asked for regular reports,” he says. “We’ve done thorough investigative work, and I have a comprehensive report for you.”
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