The long conference table could seat twenty people. The walls were aquamarine and the carpet a dark tone. The tall windows were dressed with floor-to-ceiling vertical blinds. Police crests from various countries, which had been given as gifts, decorated the walls. Among them was a plaque from the Helsinki VCU.
Before Suhonen could pour his coffee, Toomas Indres glided into the room.
“Hi,” Indres said in Finnish, hurrying over to shake Suhonen’s hand.
“Hello,” Suhonen answered in Estonian. The man’s handshake was intense.
Indres, the head of intelligence for the Estonian Central Police, was ten years Suhonen’s junior. Young leaders were not unusual in Estonia. The head of the entire ECP was only thirty-two years old. In post-Soviet times, the ECP was known for quickly promoting young, able agents in order to sever ties with the old Soviet system. Indres wore a pair of black jeans, a white T-shirt and a light blue blazer. His hair was blond and closely cropped.
“How are you? Still swimming?” Suhonen asked. He recalled that Toomas was an open-water swimming enthusiast, and had logged some long distances.
“Heh, yeah. Next summer about ten friends and I plan to swim from Tallinn to Helsinki. It’ll be good practice, just in case the Ruskies take their tanks across the border someday.”
Suhonen chuckled, though he suspected Indres was only half-joking, at least in his hatred toward the Russians. The Soviet occupation from 1940 to 1988 had carved deep wounds into the Estonian psyche. Rather than watching Soviet propaganda, many Estonians had watched Finnish TV, which easily carried over the Gulf of Finland. As a result, and because Finnish and Estonian were closely related languages, most Estonians were nearly fluent in Finnish.
“What about you guys?” Indres asked, gesturing for Suhonen to sit across the table. He poured the coffees.
“What about us… The big-wigs have grand plans and even grander visions. But despite them, we still solve our cases.”
“Hear you there. You had some photograph?”
Suhonen dug two folded letter-size printouts out of the breast pocket of his leather jacket. It was his best photo from the Velodrome; one of the images was the original, the other a close-up of Gonzales and the unknown man.
Suhonen set the printouts in front of Indres and pointed to Gonzales. “This one I know, but who’s this other guy?”
Indres looked at the photos for a moment. “What’s this about?”
Suhonen chuckled to himself, but not aloud. This is how it always went with these intelligence types. Nothing was free. Everyone wanted to know more about the case.
“This is Mike Gonzales…”
“A foreigner?” Indres cut in.
“Nope,” Suhonen shook his head. “A homeboy. Formerly Mika Konttinen.”
“OK. Go ahead,” Indres said, tasting his coffee.
Suhonen did the same before continuing. “So, this Gonzales-Konttinen is a pretty well-known black market operator. Construction fraud and such. That in itself doesn’t interest us, but lately he’s been hanging around with the Skulls. And the day before yesterday I snapped these photos of him with buzz cut here.”
“Gonzales is under surveillance then.”
“Nope. Just a coincidence.”
Indres laughed. “Good police work calls for coincidences. Do you have an open investigation on this Gonzales?”
“No. Just gathering intel.”
“But there’s something interesting about him?”
Suhonen thought for a second. “Isn’t it enough that the guy is a con-man, hangs out with real bad guys and drives a BMW sports car?”
“Sure. That’s plenty. Especially the Beamer. Nobody with that car could be a good person.”
Indres, Suhonen knew, rode a Harley in the summer months.
“So you know him?” Suhonen asked. He was beginning to tire of the prying.
“A Russian is a Russian, even if he’s fried in butter,” Indres said dryly.
“Though in this case it’s one of our own homegrown Estonian-Russians. The man’s name is Sergei Zubrov. Lives in Tallinn. A good year ago, Zubrov was involved in a big cocaine trafficking operation, but never ended up in court.”
“What’s he doing now?”
“We haven’t been tracking him,” Indres said, shrugging.
“So he hasn’t been involved?”
“You think he’s doing some business with this Gonzales?”
“It’s a possibility, at least.”
Indres nodded. “I can look into it a little further. It’s easier to track the Russians than our own outlaws. The Russians still have traditional hierarchical organizations where each man has his own role. Our local hoodlums have shifted to more of a project-based model where the group comes together for one specific gig, and when it’s completed, the team breaks up. We really don’t have any pure drug or theft gangs anymore. Each gang member works and gets paid on a job-by-job basis. It’s pretty damn difficult to keep up on who’s dancing with who.”
Suhonen poured himself another cup of coffee.
The men chatted for nearly an hour before Suhonen announced that he had to leave.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22
CHAPTER 4
THURSDAY, 8:30 A.M.
VANTAA PRISON, VANTAA
Tapani Larsson was marching along a concrete walk through the prison yard, headed toward the perimeter wall and the main gate. His pace was brisk and the pot-bellied guard struggled to keep up. Last night’s rain had dwindled into a light drizzle.
Larsson’s tattoos rose from beneath the collar of his leather jacket, reaching toward his bald head. Winding around his neck were a snake, a naked woman and an eagle. His cheeks were sunken and his eyes hard and piercing.
Larsson was fuming, but less so today than over the last year and a half. The man’s hand continually closed into a fist and reopened again. Hand, fist. Hand, fist. Larsson, the Skulls’ second-in-command, had served most of his sentence in Turku’s new prison in Saramäki. In accordance with standard procedure, he was to be released from the prison nearest his home. The Helsinki Prison was full, so the pen in suburban Vantaa got the job. Larsson couldn’t care less which institution’s door slammed shut behind his back, as long as he was on the outside.
The prison guards at Vantaa would have rather kept the violently unpredictable man longer, but the Court of Appeals had shortened his extortion sentence from three-and-a-half years to sixteen months. Today marked the end of Larsson’s term.
Larsson’s last three months in the Turku Prison had been spent in the maximum security ward. He had wondered about the decision, but somehow the warden had been convinced that Larsson had been orchestrating criminal activity from within the prison walls.
The maximum security ward was no Papillon, but it wasn’t far off. An hour a day outdoors, a miserable weight room and all visits conducted behind thick plexiglass. The purpose of maximum security was to try to soften up the inmate. Try harder, Larsson had thought. Captivity had only made him more defiant.
Government oversight of the maximum security ward essentially consisted of an assistant parliamentary ombudsman visiting once a year to make sure the flowers were watered.
Larsson spit on the wet prison lawn. Not to protest, just to spit.
The previous day, he had been transported from Turku on the prisoner train and had slept the night in a Vantaa cell. Wake-up call was at 6:30, breakfast 7:00 sharp. At 8:00, he turned in his prison duds and signed for his civilian clothes: boxers, a dark green T-shirt, white sport socks, combat boots, camouflage pants and a black leather jacket. His other belongings-a radio, books, shaver and toothbrush-were in his duffel bag. He had given his tube of toothpaste to a friend in the Turku pen.