“It’s the government, Dad,” said Rudi. “They can’t get the Ministry to fire you because that would be too obvious, but there’s a lot of other stuff they can do. You have no idea.”
“Maret found child pornography on our computer,” said Toomas.
Rudi regarded his father levelly.
“Oh,” Toomas waved his hand irritably, “not mine. Planted there. Another part of the conversation.”
“What did you do?”
Toomas shrugged. “Formatted the drives and then took them out and physically destroyed them.”
“I hope you destroyed them thoroughly.”
“I put them through a woodchipper.”
“That’ll do it,” Rudi allowed.
Toomas glared at him. “You’re enjoying this.”
“It’s not without its humorous side, but no, I’m not really enjoying it. That won’t be the end of it, you know. There’ll be some stuff in secure online storage somewhere that leads back to you, with passwords only you’d know.”
“I know. They were just letting me know it’s ready and waiting for them to use to discredit me, if they think they have to.” Toomas sighed. “Maret… Maret said she believed me when I told her I knew nothing about it. She said she believed me when I told her it was planted there. But I saw the look in her eyes, and she wasn’t sure.”
“Oh.” Rudi scowled and rubbed his face.
“Those motherfuckers have come between me and my partner,” said Toomas. “Coming after me, I could accept that. I’m a big boy now and I know the rules of the game. But involving Maret…” He shook his head. “No. I won’t stand for that.”
“It might have been a move to provoke you into doing something stupid,” Rudi warned. “Make you do most of their work for them.”
“Why would they care about that? They have plenty of resources.”
“It limits their exposure. The less they have to do, the less there is for nosey journalists to discover after it’s all over.”
Toomas’s shoulders slumped. “So what should I do?”
“About the pornography? There’s nothing you can do. There’s no way to find it because we don’t know where it is. We can’t just google your name and ‘child pornography’ and there it’ll be, sitting on a server in a cupboard in Dushanbe or Buenos Aires. You’ll have to be proactive. Write to the news channels. Tell them what you found on your computer. Tell them you suspect there’s another stash out there, just waiting to be ‘found’ to blacken your name.”
“They’ll deny it.”
“Of course. But it makes it a little harder for them to suddenly ‘find’ it and make it look credible. And it gets you into the conversation.” Rudi ran a hand through his hair. “Listen to me. I came out here to talk you out of this madness and I’m giving you advice instead.”
“Can you and your friends help?”
Rudi felt a chill touch him. “I’m a chef, Dad. Most of my friends are chefs. We could do the catering for you.”
“Frances says you’re with Intelligence.”
Oh, so that was it. He breathed a barely-detectable sigh of relief and then burst into real laughter. “No, Dad, I’m not with Intelligence. I just cook food.”
Toomas’s face fell. “I thought…”
“No,” said Rudi, for the first time in many years feeling anything approaching sympathy for his father. “Just a cook.”
Toomas grimaced. “Ach, you’d have to say that.”
Rudi spread his hands in exasperation. “Just a cook,” he said again. “And if I were with Intelligence, I’d be working for the Government and I’d be the very last person you’d want to ask for help.”
“So it’s true? You’re a cuckoo in my nest, then?”
Rudi slapped his forehead. “Dad, no! I don’t work for Intelligence. I’m a chef.” He rubbed his eyes. “The only way to get out of this thing is to stop it.”
Toomas shook his head. “Won’t happen.”
“Send them a message. Tell them you’re prepared to compromise.”
“No compromise.”
“Tell them…” He searched for the words. “Tell them you’ll back down if they guarantee the status of part of the park in perpetuity. Tell them you’ll settle for that, they can have the rest for their hotels and arenas.” He spread his arms wide. “It’s a big park, Dad.”
Toomas had not stopped shaking his head. “No. No. No. No compromise. No surrender. They don’t get their filthy hands on another square millimetre of this place. They’ve driven a wedge between me and Maret and I’m not going to sit down and let that pass. One of us gets the entire park, the other gets nothing. That’s how it will end.”
“It will end with you dead,” Rudi said.
Toomas abruptly stopped shaking his head. He looked at his son and then he walked back towards him until they were almost chest-to-chest. “You think I care about that, boy?” he snarled.
“There’s going to be a catastrophe here if you carry on,” Rudi snarled back. “Seriously. And it won’t just involve you. It’ll involve Ivari and Frances and Maret and everyone you ever cared about.”
Toomas tipped his head to one side and looked at Rudi. “You think we have a chance.”
Rudi glared at him. “From what Ivari told me, yes, you have a chance. They think you have a chance, otherwise they wouldn’t be opening a conversation with you.”
Toomas poked Rudi in the chest with a bony forefinger. “They’re scared!” he shouted triumphantly. “And scared people make mistakes. We can win this, boy.”
“If they are scared, they are very powerful scared people, and those are the worst kind,” Rudi said. “If you keep provoking them they’ll just squash you and carry on as if you never even existed.”
“You think I’m afraid?”
“I think you ought to be.”
Toomas looked at his son for a long time without speaking. Finally, he shook his head. “I’m not stopping now. We’re having a meeting in the Conference Centre on Wednesday night. You should come.”
“I’m going into Tallinn on Wednesday,” Rudi said. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
Toomas shrugged. “Please yourself.” And he turned and walked back to the Humvee.
Rudi heard the motor start up, heard the old man bully the big vehicle into what sounded like a fifteen-point turn before driving back down the track. He waited for the sound of the engine to die away. Then he waited another couple of minutes, just watching the sea. Then he took out his phone and dialled a number.
When it was answered, he said, “I’m afraid Laurence has food poisoning and won’t be able to attend this evening.” Then he hung up and stood watching the sea for a long time.
IT HAD BEEN a while since he’d been to Tallinn. He didn’t count flying into Ülemiste the other night and getting a cab straight to the Palmse tram. He didn’t know whether to be mildly pleased or mildly irritated that nothing seemed to have changed. The city looked more or less the same as he remembered. Maybe a few more big office buildings. The harbour hadn’t changed at all, and neither had the Old Town. Even the semi-drunken English stag parties were still coming here. Walking past the Hotell Viru, he spotted half a dozen young men in cold-weather clothing and colourful woolly hats stumbling singing out of the front doors of the Soviet-era edifice. He stopped across the street and watched them them go. Then he looked up at the façade of the old Intourist hotel. Legend had it that the KGB had bugged every room in the place, back when certain people thought these things mattered. He wondered if it was true; certainly someone would have checked, after the Russians left.