Long Shot

4

They had not been cautious with their movements, which indicated they had nothing to conceal nor anything to fear, which further indicated that they were a pair of cops.

An attractive middle-aged woman wearing a plain-knit white crewneck sweater and jeans stepped forward. A mane of blond hair parted in the middle swept to her shoulders. Her partner was a solid, straw-haired man with sharp blue eyes set in an otherwise blank face that had been leathered by the winter sun. An outdoorsman, and in good shape, Kyle thought. The man edged off to one side, opening space to triangulate Swanson, who recognized the tactical shift. It was the move of a professional and meant that if Kyle chose to resist, he could only deal with them as individuals.

“Mister Swanson, I am Inspector Rikka Aura, and this is Sergeant Alan Kiuru. We are with the Security Intelligence Service and would appreciate a few minutes of your time.” She flashed a badge. She was not really asking; she was telling. Inspector Aura was with Supo, the Suojelupoliisi, federal police, and had the power of her government at her back.

“I’m right here in front of you, Inspector. What do you want?”

“In private, if you please.”

He grinned. “I prefer that we stay in public view. I feel more comfortable out here.”

“I must insist,” Aura answered politely. “We prefer not to discuss national security issues in front of big hotels.”

With the preliminary fencing complete, Kyle nodded. “Let’s go up to my suite. I’ll order some coffee,” he said. He had forty-five minutes before the American DSS escort agent was to arrive. The CIA was expecting him. People at the U.S. Embassy knew he was coming. The Finnish Defence Ministry had him scheduled for after lunch. Ivan the Terrible, the Russian who had started the dominoes falling, was aware that Kyle was probably on the way. Now a pair of Supo agents had shown up, and it wasn’t yet nine o’clock. For a mission that had begun in the utmost surprise and secrecy less than twenty-four hours earlier, a lot of people knew that Kyle Swanson was in Helsinki.

The inspector got comfortable by taking the largest chair in the room while the sergeant stayed alert near the door. The room maid had not yet been around, but the place was still tidy because Kyle’s military training had ingrained in him the need for being shipshape in his personal space. Her eyes vacuumed the place while he ordered room service, coffee for three.

“So. What is this about, Inspector?” Kyle asked.

Like all cops, she answered with a question of her own. “Why are you here, Mister Swanson?”

He came back with, “Do I need a lawyer?”

Aura shook her head. “This is a courtesy visit. No, you are not in any trouble. Why are you in Finland?”

Swanson sighed with resignation and found a straight chair off to one side. “A combination of business and pleasure.”

The sergeant by the door had pulled a small notebook computer from his jacket and read from it. “Executive vice president of Excalibur Enterprises, Limited, based in London and Washington, D.C.”

“Yes.” Best to keep the answers simple.

“And you have a meeting at one o’clock today with Colonel Max Piikkilä at our Defence Ministry.” A bit of acting.

“No. It’s at two o’clock.”

Inspector Aura spoke. “That is your only business appointment, and it was only requested late yesterday afternoon. Why was that?”

“I hope to get the colonel’s advice and permission for a tour of some Finnish industrial plants during the next few days so as to introduce our product line around. That sort of thing, Inspector. Normal outreach procedures, scratching for new customers and suppliers. You know how it is.”

She kept the pleasant look on her face. “You arrived very late at this hotel. Why was that?”

“I flew in from Italy after a business trip there, and it was a long flight.”

Sergeant Kiuru pulled up more information and spoke. “Yet you did not arrive on any commercial flight. You cleared customs on the military side of the airport. That is peculiar.”

Kyle answered, “Not in my world. We frequently fly on private aircraft, and, in fact, own one. Waiting in airports is a waste of time, and time is money.”

Now the inspector’s eyes grew flinty as she took over. “The plane’s tail number shows that it is an aircraft that we know is owned by a front company controlled by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. So I am wondering why this wandering important business executive with only one appointment in Finland flies in on a CIA plane.”

Swanson waved off the question as also being unimportant. “There is nothing mysterious about it at all, Inspector Aura. My company deals in advanced military technology and maintains very good relations with various government agencies. My office discovered the plane was available in Rome, while our company jet was in England. It was a simple lease arrangement and it happens all the time.”

“A man with your incredible military record flies all the way from Rome to Helsinki on a CIA jet for a business appointment that had not yet been made?”

“You spent a long time in the U.S. Marines,” read the sergeant. “Exceptional sniper.”

Kyle did not respond other than nodding in the affirmative.

“What of the pleasure side, Mister Swanson? You mentioned business and pleasure.”

“Now you are getting personal, Ms. Aura.” He intentionally dropped her official title. “Who I want to see in my personal life is none of your business.”

She rolled her eyes, as if enjoying the verbal fencing. “Ah. An affair of the heart. Perhaps you have a secret lover in our country. How touching. What’s her name?”

“Again, none of your business.”

“It is all my business. Sergeant? What does your computer say about all of this?”

“There was nothing romantic at all. He was brought to the hotel by Special Agent Lem James of the U.S. Department of State Security Service, and they had drinks. The bartender and registration desk confirm.”

“So Lem James is the friend that you came to see? I’ve known him for several years. Very nice man. Very professional and quite large. Do you know where he was born? I do. How many children does he have?”

“You can ask him about his life story in about thirty minutes. He’s meeting me here.”

“Where are you going?”

“Lem is taking me over to the embassy to introduce me around to the trade and military people there. Then we have some lunch and I go to see Colonel Piikkilä…”

“And then you go tour some plants and maybe take a reindeer sleigh ride and watch the northern lights with your secret lover. Before you do any of that, can you tell me why the U.S. Embassy has tightened its security so much? The Marine guards have even requested extra local police patrols. What’s going on, Mister Swanson?”

“Since I have never been there, I don’t know what they do.” Kyle thought Inspector Aura’s grandmother may have been a great white shark.

The woman got up and brushed down her jeans, as if she had just eaten crumbly toast. “No. Of course you would not know. I mean, how could you? Before we leave, however, you need to understand a bit of important Finnish history.”

“Fine. I’m listening. Anything to get rid of you.”

She smirked. “Our country is a proud member of the European Union. We have never joined NATO, not only because we think that it is merely a front for American policy in the region, but also because we signed a neutrality treaty in 1948 with our trading partner and good next-door neighbor, Russia. Our government has no intention of antagonizing Russia more than we do already on almost a daily basis.”

“May I reply to that nonsense?”

“No. I came here to inform you, Mister Swanson, that whatever is going on with you and the American embassy will not be allowed to spill beyond those gates and put our country at risk.” Her words were sharp and then, from her purse, she withdrew a U.S. passport. “This is yours, sir. It will be returned to you tomorrow morning when you leave. You can make your own arrangements, but you are no longer welcome in Finland. Meanwhile, our people will follow you… for your own protection, of course. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to an important business executive.”

“Wait a minute. You are kicking me out of the country?”

She and the sergeant were at the door, ready to leave. “Yes,” she said. “And don’t come back.”

There was a small traffic jam in the hotel hallway as the Supo officers almost collided with the coffee trolley being pushed by a room service boy, and Lem James stepped from the elevator.

“Hello, Lem,” Inspector Rikka Aura said with a genuine smile. Old friends.

“Morning there, Rikka. And Alan, too.” James was puzzled, but showed no surprise at coming so unexpectedly upon Aura and Kiuru. He saw there was a coffee service for three on the little cart that pushed through as they stepped back against the hallway walls to let it pass. Kyle Swanson was leaning against the open door of his room, grimly watching. James wanted to ask, “What the fuck is going on here?” but instead said, “You guys are up bright and early.”

“Yes,” confirmed Alan Kiuru, with a satisfied look. “Early birds out catching worms. What happened to your face?”

The DSS agent’s right eye socket and cheek was a pattern of yellow, black and purple, and his lip had been cut. “My son and I were doing mixed martial arts last night,” he explained.

The inspector laughed. “Your son is four years old.” She flicked her eyes back to Swanson. I know the family.

“He got lucky. I’ll get him next time.”

“I would like to stand here and learn more of that assault, but we are in a hurry right now. We will see you later today, I’m sure. Please say hello to all of my friends over at the embassy.” They stepped aboard the elevator, which had not yet closed its doors. She waved. He waved back.

The trolley was now in the room, and Swanson signed the chit and the bellman left. James asked what the hell was going on.

Swanson poured two cups of the hot liquid and took his own over to the bed, where he sat down. “That bitch just dropped by to throw me out of their damned country.”

James picked up his cup, and the dainty china looked tiny is his hand. He remained standing, his eyes and brain busy absorbing the events of the past few minutes. “Watch your mouth, and don’t call Rikka a bitch, Swanson. She’s a friend. And she is also the best counterterrorism investigator in Supo, and Kiuru is a rising star. If those two came by, the expulsion order came from the top.”

Kyle fluffed a pillow, lay back and sipped the dark coffee as he thought. “Yeah. She’s no dumb flatfoot. I got that. She ripped through my cover like a paper shredder. Fuck Finland.”

Lem James picked his cell phone from a pocket. “You get ready to go while I alert our powers-that-be over at the embassy that our Finny friends are acting weird. You know that in one town over here, they have an annual Carry-Your-Wife Contest?”

Swanson went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. Before closing the door, he called out, “And I think their light-roast coffee sucks!”

“Of all the embassies in all the towns in all the world, he walks into mine.” Bob Carver, the State Department’s regional security officer at the American legation, massaged his temples with his fingertips. His poor Humphrey Bogart impression from Casablanca came from being saddled with a Russian defector who was creating storm waves in the normally placid Helsinki diplomatic pond. The guy hadn’t said anything yet and people were already asking questions.

Swanson was beside Carver, looking through a one-way glass into an interview room where a man was sitting alone, at ease, and looking back at what was only a reflection. He was about six-feet-tall, slim, clean-shaven and with neatly styled, soft, coal-black hair. The blue eyes were amplified a bit by modern no-rim glasses that perched on a knife of a nose, accentuating the high cheekbones. The mouth was narrow, but not in bitterness. He carried an air of both confidence and competence. He was in a gray crewneck sweater over jeans, with nice shoes, not boots.

“Tell me again about how he came in,” Swanson instructed. “Step by step.”

“We had opened the doors of the consular section, which is separate from the embassy itself, as usual on Monday morning. There is a local law security post outside, but they do not interact with visitors unless there is some problem. In this case, there wasn’t. This guy looks just like a lot of others, and he blended in without a problem.”

“How far did he get?” Kyle knew the drill, since he had worked at several embassies while he was in the Corps.

“As I was saying, he went through the outer door and got to the public area, which has a few chairs. He didn’t sit down, but went straight into the hard line. At that point, we have regulation private security behind bulletproof glass, with a Marine in a booth, like a teller at a bank drive-through.”

Kyle understood without being told that that was where things began to get strange. Had the visitor been seeking a simple visa or some other routine piece of business, he would have been buzzed through the barrier, walked through a metal detector and allowed into the secure area to wait in line with others. Not this one.

“So this dude asks the guard, ‘Can I speak to you privately?’ and the Marine shoos away the civilian security man. When they are alone, he announces, ‘I wish to speak to someone in your intelligence section. I wish to defect,’ and he slides over his ID card.” Carter folded his arms and rocked on his heels, glowering at the man in the other room.

“The Marine takes one look at the credentials and almost has a heart attack. The cards said that he is a colonel in the GRU.”

Kyle agreed that would be enough to give pause to anyone having duty at the barrier. GRU was the acronym for the Glavnoye Razedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, which was Russian military intelligence. It was only good training that kept the Marine corporal from betraying his surprise or soiling his pants. Instead, the guard politely asked our unusual visitor to have a chair while he made a quick call up the stovepipe and asked a CIA type in the consular office to come down. That guy almost had a bowel problem himself when he met Ivan Strakov.

“They took him through the hard line and the rover Marine handcuffed and searched him and put him in that very room we are looking at right now. The higher-ups were notified. Strakov remained cool all the way, obviously familiar with the routine. He identified exactly who he was, who he worked for, who his boss was and a taste of what he has in his head.”

“Which is?” Kyle asked.

“The organizational chart and layout of a Russian army artillery regiment that moved into the Crimea last week. His recitation was amazing, right down to food- and fuel-consumption estimates for the next three months.”

“Interesting information, then, and not just bullshit?” Kyle wanted a professional judgment.

“It is more than interesting, Swanson. It is an intelligence diamond because Moscow denies the regiment is there at all. We got busy with the physical proof and recognition factors, and he even volunteered some DNA. The conclusion was that he is the real deal.”

Carver huffed and glanced over at Kyle. “When we told him we were satisfied with his identity, that’s when he bombed us with the demand that he would talk only with you; the only American he really trusted. Can you make a physical identification to back up the numbers?”

Swanson had recognized the Russian on sight. He was some years older than the last time they had been together drinking longneck beers in a cowboy bar, but Ivan was no longer a kid in any way. More than a soldier, too, he looked like a successful hedge fund manager on a day off, and there was obvious arrogance running in his veins. He was fully aware of his importance, and would not sell his goods cheaply.

“And he wants to defect.”

“Yes. That’s what he said.”

Swanson paused. “What’s the plan from here?”

“He goes out tonight to Washington as part of the diplomatic pouch, aboard the same Gulfstream that brought you in.” Carver spread his hands on his wide hips. “I’ll be glad to be rid of him.”

“That works for me, since I’m being expelled tomorrow morning anyway. I’ll get what I can in the meantime, then we both wash our hands of him. Also, the sooner the better for our Helsinki pals, eh?”

“Swanson, I am no genius, but I’ve been in this game a very long time, and I think this guy is going to be big. He has nothing to do with Finland, nothing at all, other than turning up on our doorstep like a baby in a basket. He had to start somewhere, and he chose us, and maybe you will find out why. Do not trust him. Don’t trust any defector.”

“Of course not.”

“All of that personal data, you know? The DNA and the fingerprints and the background that proves he is absolutely who he says he is? There is one thing that still puzzles me.” Carver shoved his hands into his back pockets, a movement that made his belly bulge against his belt. The basset-hound eyes turned fully to Kyle.

“And that is?”

“That same sort of foolproof material was also used a few weeks ago, and delivered results that were just as positive. It proved that, without a doubt, Colonel Ivan Strakov sitting over there in the next room is dead.”