Free The Lion of Justice by Leena Lehtolainen Page A

security—ordinary folks didn’t need to know what was going on behind the scenes. They’d never understand that sometimes people in power had no choice.
    I wondered when Syrjänen had made his Kopparnäs notes. The document was last saved this spring, but that didn’t mean he created it then. David had worked in Hiidenniemi as Boris Vasiliev’s bodyguard and drove his boat, so the document could be over two years old. When I’d run into him in Kopparnäs, I had assumed he was after me, but now it seemed he had other reasons for scouting the area. I checked whether Syrjänen’s logo had changed recently, but that three-lined column drawing had been in use since 1986.
    Syrjänen had known David. Did he think David survived the explosion? Only a handful of people in Finland knew about his mission. I knew the top politicians were mostly trustworthy, but it wouldn’t be the first time one of them let a secret slip while sitting in a sauna with a friend. Mike Virtue had been flabbergasted when I told him about the sauna traditions of Finnish politicians. They really went naked into a sauna with the leader of another country? Didn’t they realize the potential of taking secret footage and using it as blackmail? And was it really smart to reveal to other leaders what you looked like naked? You could be considered weak in a negotiation that way. In his usual forward style, Edgardo had asked Mike if he meant that men with smaller dicks wouldn’t be respected when confronted by a man with a larger one. Mike had nodded, and I swear he also blushed. I described to the class how business in Finland was often conducted in saunas, and Mike made us map out the potential risks.
    Nudity wasn’t the only cause for Mike’s disapproval. In the saunas, a live fire roared in a fireplace or a wood-burning stove, boiling the water and causing temperature changes of 212 degrees when people left the sauna to frolic outside in the snow. When I added that negotiations often included drunkenness in addition to rolling naked in snow banks and diving into the lake or the sea through a hole cut into the ice, Mike exclaimed that he’d tell his clients to never take part in this crazy ritual. But I had earned the respect of my classmates: Finns sure had balls! Afterward, some of the men in my class tried to convince me to go to a Finnish sauna with them, and I declined.
    I did another search for a recent picture of Usko Syrjänen and took a few more moments to memorize what he looked like. There was nothing special about him. He was in his fifties and medium height, and he kept himself in shape by golfing and skiing. His shoulders were wide like a swimmer’s, and he had a slight paunch. His legs seemed a bit short compared with the rest of him. Syrjänen loved wearing cowboy boots and referred to himself as a self-made man. He stopped wearing glasses after his laser eye surgery, but in most of the pictures, he was squinting under his heavy lids, with large bags under his eyes. His mouth was small, his lips narrow, his chin covered in whiskers.
    The sky to the east began to gather light, and purple streaks were spreading over Käpylä. I turned the lights off and shut the computer down, but it took a while to stop my mind from running. I kept thinking about the Kopparnäs map, mixed with memories of how I’d run into David while picking mushrooms on the shores of Kvarnträsket and how hard it had been not to feed him the poisonous ones. I was still carrying the dried milk-cap mushroom pieces with me in a small vial. They wouldn’t have as quick an effect as cyanide, so I couldn’t rely on them for myself. They were reserved for my enemies. You never knew who’d turn out to be one. I drifted into restless sleep.
    When I finally woke up, I had to get dressed in record speed to make it down for breakfast. The staff was already clearing some of the food when I shoved my way through to slap frozen berries, scrambled eggs, bacon, salted herring, and