Four

The first hint came through Skype from a fellow consultant who had sometimes sent some work in my direction. I had done the same for him when it was about databases, and I had learned a thing or three about those from him, too. Also some things Oracle would not like you to know.

‘Have you heard?’

‘Heard about what?’

‘Casual Solutions. They just got raided.’

‘Had no idea.’

‘Shit, I have hours in there. I’ll probably never get paid now.’

‘That bad?’

‘I heard that they took everything, also all company phones.’

‘That’s bad. I guess I’m lucky I haven’t been working for them.’

‘Maybe this was why they didn’t want you to work for them.’

‘Maybe.’

‘If you find out something, please let me know?’

‘Sure.’

Some of the nerds are quite as bad gossips as old women - or maybe worse, since the nerds do not need to see each other in order to spread what they have heard. In two days, it was common knowledge among certain specialists that someone inside Casual Solutions had used quite a lot of the customer computing power for cryptocurrency mining and, besides that, their own machines and network were used for all kinds of shady transactions in a peer to peer network. Everything pointed to the top. All the way to the guy who had been in the Independence Day Reception at the Presidential Palace last year. Well, most likely he would spend the next reception in quite a different palace.

For a moment, I felt sorry for his workers, since some of them would certainly be out of a job even if most of them would probably continue doing what they had been doing. After all, someone would need to do the work they had been doing and nobody else would know it better than they did. Since there was absolutely nothing I could do about it, I turned my attention back to the work I had been doing. Later that week I again got a call on my cellphone that didn’t show the caller ID.

“Mikael Aho.”

“Can we meet?”

“For any special reason, sergeant Koskinen?”

“You tell me, Mr. Aho. Of course I could come to visit you and have some good coffee, but the environment there can be so frosty that good coffee gets cold way too soon.”

“You are being unfair, sergeant Koskinen. Minna isn’t that bad.”

There was laughter on the other side of that wireless phone line. An interesting idea: Wireless phone line.

“Yeah, right. The next time I come to visit I’ll make sure to sit with my back against the wall so that I can relax a bit.”

I wanted to defend Minna but I decided to remain silent. Instead, I picked up something from the dusty archives inside my head.

“There’s a cafe at the mall close to your main offices. They have booths so that you can even have a business conversation there if you are careful. That place okay for you?”

“Two thirty in the afternoon?”

“Okay by me.”

“See you then, Mr. Aho.”

I was at the cafe some five minutes early and I managed to get a booth that was quite private. Sergeant Koskinen arrived a few minutes early and as soon as she saw me she came to the booth.

“Miss Koskinen, if you let me know what you want, I can get it for you. After all, I can charge these to my company. A rare treat, in fact.”

“Are you trying to bribe me with Cappuccino, Mr. Aho?”

“There’s a decision from the Supreme Court that offering coffee or even lunch can be counted as normal hospitality and not as bribery.”

I paused and smiled at Miss Koskinen. “However, the cheesecake that they have here will certainly count as bribery. Not because of its price but taste.”

Once I got back to the table with one Cappuccino, one double espresso and two pieces of that cheesecake, Miss Koskinen slightly raised her eyebrows, but accepted the plate. Then she took the little fork and tasted the cake. After a moment she shook her head.

“I guess that I should arrest you immediately, Mr. Aho. Not because of bribery but because of trying to make a state officer lazy and fat. I’m sure that there’s some old law that forbids that.”

I just smiled a bit. “So, Sergeant Koskinen - why did you want to see me?”

“The last few weeks have been quite interesting, haven’t they? Our office is like a hornet’s nest that has been disturbed. There are so many cases going on that the bosses are almost canceling all vacations.”