Firewall/My Mother's Daughter/Shattered/Silence and Shadows [antikvár]

9mHelsinki, Finland, Monday, December 6, 1999. The Russians were serious players. If things didn't go as planned, Sergei said, I'd be lucky to be shot dead in the hotel lobby. If they captured me, I'd be taken to a remote bit of wasteland and have my stomach slit open. They'd pull my intestines out and leave me to watch them squirm around on my chest like a bucket of freshly caught eels for the thirty minutes it would take me to die. These things happen, he had explained, when you mess with the main men in ROCRussian organised crime. But I didn't have a choice; I desperately needed the cash.'What's it called again, Sergei?' I mimed the disembowelment.Eyes staring straight ahead, he gave me a brief, sombre smile and muttered, 'Viking's revenge.'It was just before 7.00pm and it had already been dark for three and a half hours. The air temperature had been well below freezing all day; it hadn't snowed for a while, but there was still a lot of the stuff about, ploughed to the sides of the roads.The two of us were parked two blocks from the Intercontinental Hotel, in the black Nissan 4x4. The rear seats were down flat to make it easier to bundle the target inside, complete with me wrapped round him like a wrestler to keep him there.We sat facing Mannerheimintie, 200 yards down the hill from our position. The boulevard was the main drag into the city centre. It carried a constant stream of slow, obedient traffic. Up here it was9