The two men cooled off drinking iced beer between sessions in the sauna on the sixth floor of the Helsinki offices that housed Mika Koskinen’s trading company. The office was designed for the way Finns did business, with a luxurious private sauna; it was far from prying eyes and was supplied with a good stock Karhula IV beer and Finlandia vodka.
They strongly suspected that Kennedy had been up to some unsavoury business with Ortega. Mika Koskinen had warned Tony Arrowsmith that Ortega was an extremely dangerous personality to get mixed up with. Ortega had had long relations with the KGB and with its successor the FSB. He was known to have been involved in money laundering and counterfeit currency, as well financing very shady business operations from the proceeds.
Arrowsmith’s friendship with Mika went back many years, it had developed through his Russian business adventures, and it was no exaggeration to describe his activities in Russia as adventures. Arrowsmith knew Russia from the early seventies during the glory of the Soviet Union when Moscow was another planet and Breznev was as mysterious as Dark Vador.
At that time the USSR, was in the perception of the general public, a hairs breadth from conquering the world whilst the USA was embroiled in an unwinable war with North Vietnam and Cuba a Soviet aircraft carrier, just a few minutes flight by atom bombers from the coast of the USA.
Every aspect of the Russian Empire had a cold superiority. Arrowsmith remembered visiting Leningrad in 1974, where he saw the inefficiencies of communism, but he clearly remembered putting it down to a Spartan philosophy, possibly superior to that of the West, which was perceived by the young generation of the time as a degenerate consumer society, bogged down on all fronts by political and economic difficulties.
On the other hand Mika’s studies of Russian Civilisation at Lenin University in Moscow had taught him very early on that Marxist-Leninist philosophy was rotten from the inside out. His studies in Russia been sponsored by the Finnish government whose every interest was to know their dangerous neighbour.
However, he had learnt that Russia was not unpredictable; neither were the Russians, they could be seen coming a long way off, they thought carefully about their plans and then carried them out brutally. Chechnya was a fine example, the same mentality continued into their new society, even the Mafiya behaved according to the same model, as did almost every person who had been brought up under Russian communism.
Those who were clever, really clever, such as Ortega, exploited the system for every thing it was worth. He used KGB methods to obtain intelligence, he used the brutal methods of the Russian security forces to enforce his plans, and he used the methods of Stalin to eliminate all obstacles, real or perceived, for the fulfilment his ambitions.
Kennedy had put his head in the lion’s mouth and with every passing day he was nearer to the destiny that waited such naive men.
Arrowsmith had at the outset been introduced to Mika through the Finnish Commercial Consul in Paris in the eighties. The consul had recommended Mika as honest and a reliable source of business advice in Moscow during the confused period between Perestroika and the fall of Gorbatchev, before the rise of Boris Yeltsin’s corrupt capitalism.
They had both found many things in common in their appreciation of life, both in leisure and business. They travelled together extensively through the USSR and its successor the Community of Independent States looking for new business opportunities.
Arrowsmith’s visit to Helsinki had been to progress the Cuban barter deal, but was also an opportunity to obtain information on Ortega, as discretely as possible and to find out whether the rumours that he had heard of Kennedy’s machinations had any serious base.
They were approaching a critical moment in Cayo Saetia and he saw Ortega as an undesirable and extremely dangerous element, in view of the potential political evolution of Havana. If USA business was to return in force to the island, association with the likes of a Mafioso such as Ortega would be damaging.
Outside the temperature was minus twenty-two degrees and the snow sparkled under the lights of Stockmans across Mannerheiminte. The trams carried office workers and the last shoppers home. They decided to dine at the Intercontinental Hotel where Arrowsmith was staying; ten or fifteen minutes walk from the office.
They could follow that up with a drink at the bar of the discotheque downstairs where they could relax watching the girls dance.
Chapter 51
Miami
Offshore Islands Page 50
