Helsinki was the hinge point, the geographical and political joint connecting East and West. It was a city built of granite and ice, a place where everyone spoke Finnish but everyone understood the subtext of silence. The perfect place for the Bear to meet the Eagle, albeit unknowingly.
Ivan Volkov arrived two days after Kaelen Vance had departed with the Professor. He moved through the Vantaa Airport like smoke—unseen, quiet, efficient. He carried one suitcase. He presented a false passport identifying him as a trade delegate from Minsk. His handler in the Finnish branch of the KGB met him in a black Volga sedan, idling in the short-term lot.
The handler, a nervous man named Mikko, drove them toward the city center without exchanging a single word. The silence was thick with the history of Finland’s delicate neutrality. Ivan studied the passing landscape—the brutalist apartment blocks giving way to elegant neoclassical architecture near the harbor.
"The American," Ivan finally said, breaking the silence in flawless Finnish, "what was her name?"
Mikko gripped the wheel tighter. "The name we are circulating through the Western channels is Kaelen Vance. Mid-thirties. Former field agent. Freelancer now."
"A freelancer," Ivan mused, the word tasting sour in his mouth. A mercenary. An ideological whore. It confirmed everything he believed about the American system—everything was transactional, nothing was sacred. "Where did she operate out of here?"
"The Hotel Kamp," Mikko said. "The suites facing the park."
He was dropped off not at a hotel, but at a secure Soviet safe house in the Eira district, a beautiful but grim apartment overlooking the harbor. It was sterile and cold, stripped of any personality. His temporary headquarters.
He spent the evening pouring over the grainy surveillance photographs the Finnish State Police had taken of the American embassy the day of the defection. There she was. Kaelen Vance. She wasn't wearing a trench coat. She wore a bright red coat, stood in the open, drinking coffee from a paper cup, looking entirely too relaxed. She was a flash of color in his gray world. He hated her instantly for her conspicuous casualness.
She embodied everything he was here to destroy. She was chaos personified, an agent of disruption who believed her whims were more important than global stability. He spent the night not sleeping, but charting her patterns, looking for the weaknesses in her arrogance.
He would begin his hunt in the morning. He wouldn't use force first. He would use the system. He would make the world smaller for Kaelen Vance until she had no choice but to face him. He would make her understand the weight of consequences.
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