by Joonas Huhta
“Yes, Decamoron?”
“Is Ruut coming to the meeting today?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can’t you call her?”
“Her phone is dead.”
“Where is she?”
Gideon shrugged. A fisherman selling fresh-caught fish found Gideon’s eyes. The man forced a smile on his face and waved. Invitingly.
Gideon sighed and turned to Ville, who poked his glasses up on a prominent bone on the bridge of his nose. He was waiting for an answer.
“Let’s go to Hemingway’s Bar.”
“I can’t. My mom will find out.”
“She’s working.” Gideon took his fake IDs out of his pocket. “Come. Just for one. Like last time. I’ll order while you pick us a table.”
“I can’t.” Ville took a smart phone out of his pocket.
“Since when have you owned a phone?”
“Since my mom decided to track my every move.”
“What? You hardly breathe fresh air. Cut the umbilical cord already.”
Ville stared at the ground.
“Give me that,” Gideon said and snatched the phone. “We can hide it or shut it down. Say it went off in your pocket.”
“Even if I did, there’s also a GPS-tracker in my backpack.”
Gideon made a nervous laugh, staring at him openly.
A girl with red hair took them by surprise. “Hi there, bone balls.”
“Hi Rebecca,” Ville murmured.
Gideon frowned at Rebecca Kreivi’s new polka hairstyle pushed to one side. She was a thin girl with wide-hipped build and hair-trigger reactions. Any verbal or unpronounced insult might set her off.
Apparently, Ville was careless with his tone of greeting, for they were caught up in the fight. Gideon focused his attention on a man buying fish. The shoulder-line under a black battered leather jacket was familiar.
Flashes of memory assaulted him: vigilant eyes looking at him on his father’s porch.
His mind and heart racing, Gideon faced Ville and Rebecca.
“…And you,” Rebecca snapped at Gideon, “Call your mother so I choose between girls’ movie night or her spiritual sessions.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Gideon hissed. “Speak normally. Don’t look. The man on my left buying fish murdered my father.”
Ville poked his eyeglasses and remained cool, but Rebecca tried to turn around. Gideon caught her wrist with a force that hurt.
Rebecca glanced at her hand. Then Gideon. She yanked her hand away and lit a cigarette so fast that Gideon and Ville thought she took the tools out her sleeve like a poker player. Practically every fiber in her emanated: ‘Play with me, and I’ll fucking rip your head off.’
Gideon glanced at the man with dark skin color now leaving.
“I need your help,” Gideon said. “Let’s tail him. I’ll pay you. Whatever it takes. Give me your phone number so that we can go separate ways and nail this guy’s ass.”
“I can’t. My mom told me not to give the number to anyone.”
Rebecca placed her hand around Ville’s throat. “You heard the man. Money. Got it?”
Ville forced a nod.
“Quickly now,” Gideon said.
The man halted. He looked at his watch, then entered the Sampokeskus shopping center from the north entrance.
Gideon ran after and said over his shoulder. “Rebecca, send me Ville’s number. We can tail him one at a time. Go west.”
Gideon speed-walked inside the building through the first pair of sliding doors of the east, knowing the man might cross his path. He hid behind a Christmas tree and cursed at stumbling into the big empty gift parcels.
He waited.
The hall was deserted. And quiet. Except for an old man snoring on a bench, the hum of two escalators, and the heat pump above the entrance.
Gideon walked inside.
Santa with Rudolph, a giant plushy, hung lower from the ceiling than usual.
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
A text message.
After Ville’s number, Rebecca had written:
Murderer follows us!
Gideon felt his heart relocate to his throat. He exploded into a run. The corridor to the north entrance was blocked by big machines and three workers hammering the floor, removing tiles.
Gideon sent a message back:
Comin.
He ran all the way to the west entrance, passing more elderly people—seriously frightened—who supported themselves with the walls.
Gideon hit his shoulder at a slowly opening sliding door and slipped out.
He peeked to the north.
The man had just disappeared behind the corner, and Gideon took his phone:
Go straight. I gotcha.
He bolted and thought how badly this could end. He stopped at the corner the man had just passed, spotted all three of them at the lights and took the Canon out of his backpack. Rebecca held Ville’s hand among a gaggle of tourists.
I’m just a bird spotter, Gideon calmed his nerves.
Rebecca and Ville walked over the street and steered away to McDonald’s.
Gideon followed the man walking over a bridge, past his friends taking a seat around a table with a sad look on their faces. He sent a message.
You did great.
The man walked through a park. Gideon took a few pictures at a delicate layer of snow resting on the branches of trees. He took one shot at the man’s back and continued.
The man left his bag of fish with a driver in an RV and walked down the road toward the north.
Gideon memorized the registration number and model, taking a shot while the driver began reading a newspaper.
He walked past the RV and soon saw the man entering Arktikum, a museum and science center on the riverbank. According to Ruut, the building’s iconic glass tube represented the frozen finger of the north, the direction it points in. But because it was so close to the water she referred to it as Water Damage, the biggest aquarium tank in Finland.
Gideon followed the man inside. All the way to a room full of stuffed northern wild animals and maps and scale models and tourist groups marveling around in blue and red thermal padded overalls. The room had only one access, so Gideon wrote another message to Rebecca.
GPS-tracker. V’s bag. Need it!
The man paused before an old scale model. He watched it, unmoving, hands resting at his sides.
The phone vibrated.
V’s shocked. Rebecca wrote. Doesn’t like the idea...
Gideon wrote back.
Money. Doubled.
The man was still silently staring at the model. Gideon waited for the answer. He would have a clear shot of the man’s face, but the sound of the camera would expose him. Then it dawned on him what the man was staring at.
Burnt bridges and buildings.
The city of Rovaniemi was demolished in 1944 after the Nazis’ scorched earth tactics in Lapland. The brothers-in-arms turned their weapons against each other because Finland was forced to break all diplomatic ties with Germany and drive the Nazis out of the country. The havoc had been masterminded by a man in Moscow, whose successor today was every bit as merciless and cold as a raging bull.
Joseph Stalin.
The screen of Gideon’s phone lit up.
Rebecca.
Persuaded him. Coming. Better be worth it!
Gideon pocketed his phone and walked away. He invented an idea of how to get the tracker to the RV without going too near.
Snowballs.
Little prank.
Everybody hates teens. Carrying the mad professor’s words in his mind, his declaration of war would either seem like vandalism, or would go unnoticed.
The first ball, however, would land on the roof, including the GPS.
23
FROM HIS ELEVATED viewpoint, Patrick Praytor peered down from the bird tower at teens he had evicted. Drunken, middle-fingers-up and openly cursing at him as they stumbled down the hill.
Soon your pathetic lives will have a new meaning…
He hummed a tune under his breath with the emotional input the view had to offer. Would the snow return before Christmas Eve?
Arkadi Alexander, one of his Russian allies, most trusted comrade and the best tech, worked with his pad. His oxidized copper green eyes flashed.
“I have located them.”
“Well tracked.” Patrick gave him a biodegradable nanodrone. A bee. A stealthy airborne camera for tactical spying and assassination. It was so natural looking that once a recon mission of an enemy identification was blown in Yemen when a bird picked one up. “Make your country proud.”
Arkadi pocketed the machine. He tightened a silencer in place, reloaded and nodded, and went to his mission.
Patrick viewed the teens disappearing out of sight below him. Soon all the parents of the world would have the tools to ensure that their children didn’t grow up mean-spirited, depressed or criminal. That would be the everlasting impact of their mission.
A small sapling pine tree, beaten and bent by the teens, caught his attention. So much stupidity and lack of intelligence. One of the teens yelled, threaten to knock over his gravestone. He balled his fists.
You’ll never get a chance at that.
Seeing the tree conjured memories of the times of interrogations in Baghdad while hunting down Saddam and questioning his bodyguards. Without a reliable power grid, torturing in makeshift electric chairs left behind men either dead or shell-shocked for life.
His mind returned a decade back to a honeymoon in the Alps. He saw his wife… drawn at gunpoint by mercenaries, a hand pulling a fistful of her hair, a knife on her exposed throat…
They made him watch.
Gang rape.
Inhumane torture.
Then feeding her to the dogs…
They burnt the house and vehicles. Left him to die in flames.
He recalled crawling out, in the snow, bleeding, walking down the slope to a village. Phantom pain in his lost little finger reflamed. He had had to chew his little finger off to keep frostbite from turning to gangrene. But losing a little finger means losing over 50 percent of grip strength and holding everyday small objects. While the index and middle fingers function, with the thumb, in pinching and grabbing—zipping zippers, buttoning buttons—the little finger teams up with the ring finger to provide power. He became left handed with firearms.
Patrick pocketed his hand and mentally locked the memory away.
I must direct human evolution.
Why wait for natural selection, which was not progressive or directional? Man had governed the evolution of so many animals and plants by far. People self-medicated every day in developed countries. Raising the bar of morality would not only meet the basic needs of the suffering and needy and do the job faster, but there would also be what the majority was praying for: The Kingdom of Heaven. Rearchitecting humans’ biological moral heritage was to be the new foundation for human flourishing. Self-sabotaging all the good efforts for the betterment of the world would cease.
Divine Civilization—I’ll build it.
A MATCHSTICK LIT behind Eric Pantzar’s eyes. “You fuckwad! You’re working with terrorists!”
Theo was impressed. With his booming voice, Eric found a way to make calm vanish from his face. First time since his boot camp. “Russia is not a terrorist government.”
“Cut the BS,” Eric said while trembling in anger and pinching the bridge of his nose. After the span of six full heartbeats, Eric grabbed his phone and dialed the president of Finland. “Your maneuver is a despicable crime against humanity.”
Theo crossed his fingers on his stomach. “I strongly advise you to hang up that call.”
Eric shot a glance over the table at him, his face a solid mask.
“The operation can’t be stopped,” Theo continued. “Otherwise, the geopolitical clock will rewind to 1939. It’s only a matter of time. You do want to eliminate the martial spirit in the human condition.”
“President Dufva,” the voice said on the phone, but Eric slammed the phone against the desk in such a fury that the glass exploded in all directions.
“Where’s your team?” Eric said. “Tell me now, or I sure as hell am going to make your life difficult.”
“My boys are everywhere. Even in your ranks. Seeking them out one by one would take weeks. The mission will be accomplished long before that.”
Eric’s stare was full of disgust. “You’re bluffing.”
“I’m doing your country a favor.”
“A favor?” Eric let out a mocking laugh. He walked to a window and opened the blinds. “See those three men out there? They’re Russians. Evaluating and inspecting our firm from bottom to the top according to the Vienna Document. Only this fucking glass stands between a cocksure war with Russia! A few millimeters! You don’t even know how often those maniacs insult our airspace! Every single-motherfucking day. Including Christmas! And we don’t have the money to keep our Hornets in the sky!”
“I assume that’s classified information.”
“Fuck you. Fuck your dignity and your protocols! You guys know the real situation on the borders better than our ministers, let alone the public.”
Theo shrugged.
Eric closed the blinds. He sank to his chair with hands over his face, still screaming curses.
Eric’s phone beeped on his desk. He answered, pieces of glass falling on his desk like hail, and cut his finger in the process.
“Dad,” Eric said. Then he showed a bloody middle finger at Theo. “Okay. That’s fine… I understand… I’ll be there. Bye.”
“Is Ilona sick?”
“Fever.”
“She’s a brave girl. I remember how strong-willed she was as five years old. She’s more like you than Iris.”
Eric said nothing.
“Hear me out. President Viktor Vodyanoy knows that Russia is founded upon one principle: the country is exceptional, and its task is Messianic…”
Eric’s phone buzzed.
The president of Finland.
“Frankly,” Eric said, not picking up the phone, “I don’t know how that differs from American politics.”
Theo leaned closer. “The power in Russia isn’t based on institutions or laws. The power of Russia is one man. The people worship him as long as he creates unity either through economic growth or conflicts. Viktor takes personal pleasure in cruelty, just like psychopaths and murderers and school bullies, and Russians are in awe of a man who shows heroic defiance. The country has to have a conflict as its primary uplift of team spirit. Although many Russians like western products and visit the West, those in power make sure the country’s inferior complex prevails, so the West can stand accused as enemies who have created all of its problems.”
“The American people suffer from the same double standard,” Eric said. “You hack the world and spy on everybody while you deny that right for everybody else. Dropping one man out of the chain of command doesn’t break their Great Mission’s aim. Besides, you’re not neighboring a psychopath who thinks his country’s borders don’t end anywhere.”
The phone rang again.
Theo leaned in, hand on one knee. “The President of Russia is coming. Think of it, Eric. Right now, on the other side of your Finnish-Russian border, the children are being raised exactly as in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, in confrontation against the US. They have already changed the course of history in schoolbooks; it’s totally biased. Russia will stop at nothing until the country is back dictating terms to the rest of the world.”
Eric considered the painted bleakness.
Theo thrust his chest out. “Viktor has a new lady who has softened his heart. He is at his most vulnerable state of mind. He knows it. He has doubled his personal guards.”
“What do you want me to do—smile at all the clusterfucking possibilities?”
“I’ll give you the specifics later. We have a consensus. You want to end the tension at
the borderlands as much as I do.”
Eric glanced at his phone ringing again. He cracked his shoulders and picked up the phone. He let out a breath and pressed the answer with the bleeding hand. Then he said to Theo, his voice like the growl of thunder:
“You’re dismissed!”
Theo stood up and brushed a few shards from his uniform. Glass breaking underfoot, he exited the room with a wide grin.
His phone rang.
Seeing Patrick’s name on the screen tickled his skin with excitement.
24
KONRAD COULD HARDLY breathe. He cursed his swollen, snot-clogged sinuses while evaluating the hand mark on the tree.
The forest had always been a place for hiding and games, growing up. All those times spent in the woods made him feel privileged. Hunting small animals with his grandfather’s juniper-longbows, spending time in a self-made tree house, reading comics and doing experiments with gunpowder (and burning down the tree house), carving wood vessels and playing Pooh-sticks on old bridges. Thinking of shooting blueberries with a blowpipe at people’s clothes took him back instantly to his childhood.
When did I get so old?
“A penny for your thoughts,” Ruut said.
Konrad turned to her. “It’s getting cold. Soon we’ll get snow.”
“You can predict the weather?”
Konrad pointed at his right eye. “A believer once hit me when I was fourteen. That’s the reason my eyes seem mismatched. The pupil in my right eye is enlarged. Permanently open. Every time the air pressure shifts, my eye subtly aches.”
“Not possible.” Ruut took a long close look to tell the difference. “You’re kidding, right?”
“My eye doesn’t lie.” He glanced at the woods. “Any idea why they haven’t come?”
“They might be waiting for our next move.”
“Who are they?”
Ruut leaned closer and traced Konrad’s forehead with the tip of her index finger.
“Worry lines again?”
“I thought I saw the sign of the devil,” Ruut said. “Maybe they fear you.”
Her eyes went wide at a sudden realization. The phone in her pocket had sprang alive by itself.
