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 silent subtext. The perfect place for the Bear to meet the Eagle, albeit unknowingly. A stage of forced neutrality where every diplomat and spy moved with practiced caution.
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, its engine coughing in the biting cold.
The handler, a nervous man named Mikko, drove them toward the city center without exchanging a single word for the first twenty minutes. The silence was thick with the history of Finland’s delicate neutrality, a buffer state forever holding its breath. Ivan studied the passing landscape—the brutalist apartment blocks of the suburbs giving way to the elegant neoclassical architecture near the harbor. The city felt clean, precise, a stark contrast to the gritty, sprawling complexity of Moscow.
"The American," Ivan finally said, breaking the silence in flawless, clipped Finnish, his gaze fixed on a granite monument. "What was her name?"
Mikko gripped the wheel tighter, his knuckles white. "The name 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. Loyalty was only as strong as the last payment. "Where did she operate out of here?"
"The Hotel Kamp," Mikko said, a hint of awe in his voice. "The suites facing the park. Very expensive."
"Of course," Ivan murmured. "The expensive suites. They mistake luxury for security."
He was dropped off not at the 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, a place built only for business. It would serve as his temporary headquarters.
He spent the evening pouring over the grainy surveillance photographs the Finnish State Police had obligingly shared with their Soviet counterparts. 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 near the American embassy gates. She was a flash of color in his gray world. He hated her instantly for her conspicuous casualness, her blatant disregard for the rules of engagement.
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.
Volkov worked in silence, a method he'd perfected over two decades. He saw the world as a complex machine where every human action was a predictable gear turn. Vance was an anomaly, a variable thrown into the mechanism to cause maximum disruption. He would analyze the variable until it made sense. He noted her preference for open spaces, her reliance on speed and movement, her visible consumption of American fast food and high-end goods, evident even in the blurry photos.
He planned his countermove not as an assassination—not yet—but as a slow, tightening squeeze. 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 consequence. The game had begun, and Ivan Volkof played for keeps.
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