“You won’t get caught for the simple reason that police corruption, at least in the public consciousness, is so rare here as to be non-existent, and you’re the most famous cop in the nation, so no one would believe it. It would be like trying to convince them that Jesus was a pedophile.”
It’s true. After being shot twice in the line of duty and being decorated for bravery both times-and especially since Milo and I stopped a school shooting and were glorified in the press for saving the lives of children-I’m a nationally respected figure.
“But sure, I’ll do it,” he said. “It will be fun. I’ll keep them in a code from the war and teach it to you, make it feel like the old days.”
Most of Arvid’s time in the war was spent in Valpo, our secret police during those years.
Then I brought up what I really wanted to talk about, and told Arvid about going flat and feeling no emotion. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to keep up the pretense, and it will cause me to wreck my marriage,” I said, “or it will cause me to make an error in judgment in my work and get somebody hurt.”
I had already told him about my black op, ripping off drug dealers, taking money.
“I already told you, boy,” he said. “You inherited your family blood. You’re a killer, you just need the right justifications so you can pretend otherwise. There have been times in my life when I felt nothing. It started during the Winter War. I felt no fear, no joy or misery, no guilt. It went away over time, but sometimes, when I’m under stress, I still go numb inside. Our circumstances are different, your problem is neurological and mine is post-traumatic stress syndrome. I’m just saying I have an idea of what you’re going through. You love your wife. Just because you can’t feel it right now doesn’t mean it isn’t so. And this black-bag operation-you’ve been lying to yourself-people are going to die and you knew it when you took it on. Maybe you’re better off if you don’t feel anything for a while.”
Arvid had become a mentor to me. My first and doubtless last. He’s the only man I ever met that I trusted and respected enough to look to for wisdom. I didn’t say anything, just sat there and tried to process what was doubtless true. He patted my knee and went to the kitchen to do the dishes. Left me to my thoughts.
Milo called. He was building surveillance gear and a new computer, said he didn’t have room to work in his tiny apartment, and asked if he could use one end of my dining room table as a workbench.
He lives in squalor in an apartment barely big enough to turn around in. Our dining room table is huge, and he was doing this for the group. It was hard to say no.
“Are you going to trash my house?”
“No. I just need one end of the table for a couple days.”
He showed up an hour later with boxes of components. Started stacking them in the corner. It was a big pile. He was going to trash my house. Arvid walked into the room. Milo saw him and a look came over his face like he just saw the girl of his dreams. So he had an ulterior motive for asking to work here. He wanted to meet Arvid.
Milo considers himself patriotic above all things and is fascinated by Finland’s role in the Second World War. He reads incessantly about the Winter War of 1939-40, in which Finland slaughtered Russians by the droves. Arvid is one of the great heroes of the Winter War and personally killed hundreds of Russians, as well as taking out six tanks, charging at them with Molotov cocktails.
Milo raced across the room, grabbed Arvid’s hand and started pumping it. “It’s a pleasure, sir. A great honor. As a Finn, let me express my personal gratitude for your bravery and sacrifice.”
Arvid sighed, jerked his hand free. “For God’s sake, stop kissing my ass.”
Milo’s euphoria was short-lived. He hadn’t considered that Arvid might not enjoy the sum of the continual and uncritical admiration of everyone he came into contact with. “I’m sorry, sir. It’s just that …” he could only stammer.
Arvid spared him further humiliation. “It’s all right, just get over it.”
Wisely, Milo kept his mouth shut and started unpacking his boxes.
Kate walked in. She saw the mess and it pissed her off. “What in the name of God is all this?”
I said, “I told him he could work in here, because his apartment is so small.”
Kate looked put out in the extreme. “What, then, may I ask, are you building?”
He kid-in-candy-store smiled. “Can you please just wait one minute?” He unpacked an oblong box-shaped gizmo with dials and such on it. Plugged it in, made some adjustments. “This is a bug sweeper,” he said. “It detects radio signals and info-burst packets used to monitor mains-powered transmitters, telephone transmitters, video transmitters, cell phones, tracking devices, you name it. It sniffs out mains carrier low-frequency and infrared laser-emitting devices. It also picks up signals from more sophisticated devices that only transmit momentarily and notify you that a signal has been detected: burst transmitters that accumulate information and fire it off in a fraction of a second.”
“You realize,” I said, “that, to the rest of us, your explanation was just a half minute of incomprehensible ratchet noises.”
The black rings around his eyes crinkled with delight. “Allow me to demonstrate.” He walked around the room with something that resembled an oversized mobile phone with an antenna and a plethora of control gizmos. As he neared Kate’s purse, it emitted a beep that pulsed faster and faster the closer he got. He asked her to take her cell phone out of her purse. Steady beep.
The door buzzer rang. It was Sweetness, just checking to see if we need anything.
As Milo neared him, the beeping started again. And again got stronger as Milo got closer. Milo reached into Sweetness’s coat pocket and pulled out his phone. Steady beep. It was the same for all of us. Even Arvid.
“The apartment is clean,” Milo said, “but SUPO tapped all our phones.”
I wasn’t surprised. Arvid laughed. Kate’s mouth gaped. Sweetness hadn’t taken in the ramifications yet.
Milo ripped the tape off another box. It contained new Nokia phones. “These are N95s loaded with encryption software. The encryption,” he said, “is certified by the Israeli ministry of defense. There are no back doors. The encryption keys are randomly generated by the software and can’t be provided to anyone, either private organization or government. It’s a dual combination of asymmetric and symmetric encryption with end-to-end protection, from phone to phone, for both audio and text messages. A one-thousand-and-twenty-four-bit random master key is automatically generated per contact and replaced at every call start, and a two-hundred-and-fifty-six-bit random session key is replaced every second.”
He paused, waiting for us to cheer at our good fortune.
“That’s great news,” Sweetness said.
Milo didn’t get it that Sweetness was teasing him. “Just insert the SIM cards from the phones you have now, and your privacy is ensured. We can even have conference calls if we like.”
“I get one too?” Arvid asked. “What for? I just change diapers and cook.”
“Sir,” Milo said, “what is ours is yours. I have another gift for you as well, but I’d like to wait until we have Kari’s ‘Welcome back to the world’ party, when he officially goes back on duty to give it to you.”
I forgot to mention it to Kate.
“Party?” she asked.
“If it’s OK with you,” Milo said, “I’d like to have it here on the twenty-eighth of March. I need time to get everything together. It’ll take a few weeks. I have-or will have-gifts for you as well.”
Her curiosity was piqued. “Sure, we can have a party.”
She was miffed because the house was full of people. Violent and criminal people at that, even if they all worked for the police-or, in Arvid’s case, used to. Later, she told me she felt as if she was trying to raise a child in the lair of a terrorist cell. But Milo had proven the value of his undertakings and won her over for the time being.
“What else are you working on?” sh
e asked.
“I’m building three synthesizable VHDL models of exact solutions for three-dimensional hyperbolic positioning systems,” he said.
“More ratchet noises,” she answered.
“They’re mobile stations for eavesdropping on cell phones, so we can do to the bad guys what was done to us. They’re not that great. The range is only a couple miles and they can only handle three or four phones at a time, but they’re the best I can do. And I’m building a new computer to suit our purposes. There isn’t one commercially made that has the exact components I want, and it saves a lot of money, too.”
“Here’s the deal,” she said. “My husband is recovering from two major surgeries. He needs quiet. We have a newborn infant. She and I both need quiet. You can spend a limited amount of time here to build your toys, but I want the house kept neat and your presence unobtrusive.” She turned to Sweetness. “You really are sweet, and you have our gratitude for driving Kari around, for shopping and just being generally helpful. But from now on, call before you come over, and don’t call three times a day. This is our home, not your squad room.”
Milo and Sweetness stared at the floor, hands in pockets, and waxed regretful.
“Kate, should I go home?” Arvid asked.
She walked over and put her hand on his shoulder. “Please, stay a few more days. You’ve been a great help to us, and we’re grateful.”
He flashed the smile that charmed her and nodded assent.
Kate left the room, went to tend to Anu.
I asked Milo, “How many heists have you pulled since I gave you that packet of info?”
“Two.”
“How did they go?”
He and Sweetness shared an awkward glance. “Last night, we cased the apartment and the dealer was gone, so I picked the lock and we entered. A woman was asleep in her bed. She heard the door open, woke up, came out of her bedroom and saw us.”
“What happened?”
“I found a roll of duct tape and mummified her. She had on pajamas, but still, it would have hurt like hell when it got pulled off, so Sweetness stood her up and held her up in place, and I rolled it around her backwards, so the sticky part faced out. Only her mouth was taped shut, and we tied a scarf around her eyes. Then we stuck her to the kitchen wall. And after all that, we only got twenty-three thousand euros.”
“Can she ID you?”
“No. We wore balaclavas the whole time.”
It must have made an interesting picture. “Milo, work on your contraptions for a while if you want. Quietly. Sweetness, go home for a while or dig some dirt on politicos or whatever. Both of you be back here tomorrow at three p.m. Milo, what weapons have we confiscated?”
“Four handguns, a sawed-off shotgun, and a Daddy MAC.”
We would save the MAC-10 for something special. Illegal possession of fully automatic weapons carries more jail time. “Bring a couple pistols,” I said, “for a frame-up.”
Sweetness left. Milo unpacked his goodies, placed the components in orderly piles in the corner and threw out the boxes, so the dining room did indeed look neat. He left for the day, and according to Kate’s wishes, we passed a quiet evening.
11
In the morning, Aino, Kate’s assistant, who was taking Kate’s place while she was on enforced maternity leave, stopped by our apartment to drop off some papers. Her gorgeous blue eyes were framed by a mop of messy blond hair. She’s built the opposite of Kate. Short and lush instead of tall and thin. A long and sexy upper lip. Her sweater accentuated magnificent breasts. I got an insta-hard-on. All I could think about was fucking her.
It took me by surprise. I’d never wanted anyone besides Kate since I first laid eyes on her, and I hadn’t had this kind of reaction to a woman since I was a teenager. I tried not to stare, to act natural. I was sitting on the couch and covered my crotch with the morning newspaper. I had found a new dimension to my post-op symptoms. My primitive desires included other women.
Jyri called. There were a number of big-money drug deals going down over the coming weeks. He knew I was weak and on crutches. How much could I do? Could Milo and Sweetness work independent of me? Could we get the jobs done? He didn’t know how much they had already accomplished. I wanted to participate. I was bored shitless. I said we would find a way. Unless I was on death’s door, I would participate. I counted the days. Two weeks until I could drive again. A month until I ditched the crutches.
Aino stayed for coffee, hung around for about an hour. She and Kate had a blossoming friendship. I was glad when she left. Her presence made me feel like my dick was going to burst.
A packet of dossiers arrived about two p.m. They contained info on criminals culled from the ship’s manifest of the Baltic Princess, the ferry from Tallinn due to arrive in Helsinki at four thirty. I agreed to participate in this black-ops project because I wanted to help people. This day marked my first attempt to do so.
Milo showed up around noon and started assembling his new computer. The circles around his eyes were so dark, he looked like he wore camo stick.
“How many hours do you normally sleep?” I asked.
“Two or three.”
“Why?”
“It’s all my body requires.”
He has problems I didn’t even want to contemplate.
While he worked on his electronics, I memorized the faces of the criminals entering the country aboard the Baltic Princess.
The ferries are cruise ships and offer all the amenities. The larger ones offer nightclubs and big stage-production entertainment. Cabins of various grades. Pubs. Shopping malls. A variety of restaurants, including fine dining. A buffet that offers at least fifty dishes. The main attraction is buying goods at Estonian prices. Alcohol, tobacco and luxury items, especially perfume and makeup, are offered at about half of Finnish rates. The trips are inexpensive, and the usual trip entails groups having parties at sea and drinking themselves into cut-rate comas.
They also transport about a hundred criminals a day from Tallinn into Helsinki. There is no airport-type inspection. The ferries bring thousands of people back and forth between the two cities every day, but have almost no security. The criminals bring drugs, guns, women pressed into prostitution. The border police safeguarding the harbors were recently cut by eleven percent, so they’re by and large lawless zones.
We took Milo’s Nissan Sentra. Not suitable for Sweetness the baby-faced ogre and a large man on crutches. My plan was to strong-arm a couple pimps, frame them up, stick them in a Finnish jail, and send their hookers back to Estonia.
It was a cold, blustery day, flurries of snow on and off. The full parking lot was filthy gray ice. We parked and leaned against the car. Milo and I smoked. Sweetness injected nuuska into the hole in his gum and took a hit from his flask. He offered it to us. We declined.
The ship landed. Passengers disembarked. Most bore heavy loads from shopping in Estonia. Some got in the taxi line. Some made for the tram. They were no good to us. We couldn’t shake them down in a crowd. Others made their way to the bar on the other side of the lot to keep the party rolling. I watched faces. For a while, it seemed I would be disappointed. No criminals from the rap jackets appeared. Then finally, when the ship was almost empty, two pimps with four girls headed toward the bar. All were well dressed, young, good-looking.
Sweetness held my arm to keep me from falling, and we met them in the center of the lot. We drew guns. We flashed police cards. The men swore, protested, threatened. The girls stayed quiet. Milo and Sweetness threw the men up against a car, kicked their legs apart, patted them down and took their passports. I took the passports from the girls, wrote down their names, DOBs and passport numbers so I could check up on them later, and gave their passports back to them. Two of them were underage.
Milo took the pimps’ flash rolls and handed them to me. I counted out about seven thousand euros, divided it into four, and gave it to the girls. Sweetness translated for me. “Go back to Estonia. Get out of Tallinn. If you do
n’t want to hook anymore, disappear. Get a job. This is your start-up money.”
They just stared at me. “Scram!” I shouted and Sweetness repeated, shouted, after me. They ran back to the terminal.
Milo took two pistols out of his coat and held them out to the pimps. They got the idea. Frame-up and jolt in Finnish prison. They refused to touch them.
We pressed Glocks into their chests. I said, “We put them in your hands while you’re alive or after you’re dead. Same difference.” Sweetness translated. They took the pistols, reluctant. We called the border police and handed the pimps off to them. We helped the girls. Strong-arm, extortion and frame-up. It seemed right. Mission accomplished.
12
The next night, I made a call to the police in Estonia, gave them the ID info from the hookers we’d sent back there to get a new lease on life. Three were in the hospital, raped and beaten, used rubbers stuffed in their mouths. One was dead, killed in her apartment. Her hands in a kitchen sink filled with water. A toaster tossed in. Electricity fried her face glossy black. She was fifteen. They had gone straight from the boat to a whore bar hangout. Word of the pimps’ arrest made it there within hours. They took the blame. I tried to do good. Their blood was on my hands. It was an experiment I wouldn’t try again. Arvid was right, people would be hurt. I was a fool.
Milo finished building his toys. His laptop and the mobile eavesdropping devices’ stations were slaved to the computer he had built. By this point, Milo and Sweetness had attached GPS tracking devices to the vehicles of most of the major criminals in Helsinki. We could watch them travel on a computer screen.
The capabilities were limited by range and the number of phones they could monitor at one time, but Milo set up his mobile eavesdropping stations to monitor the phones of criminals on our upcoming heist list. Their calls were recorded, as were their SMS messages. If they were in Russian or Estonian, Sweetness translated. Milo could set his phone up to ring when a particular criminal’s phone was in use, handy if we planned to rob said criminal at a particular day and time. The criminals told us where they were, what they had, and when to rob them.
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