some useful information in it. We tape their mouths shut. They start coming around.
“Can we scarper now?” the Raper asks.
“Soon,” I say. “Take us to the game, put on happy faces, and tase the guards outside the door. Same deal. I’ll listen. Tell me when they’re down.”
“Yer a God-rotted bastard,” he says, and does as he’s told.
We follow the brothers through the kitchen storeroom, they motion for us to stop, and they start down a hallway. Upstairs in the nightclub, the music must be blaring. Here in the staff area, I can’t hear a goddamned thing. The soundproofing is excellent. The Raper gives me the go-ahead. We start down the hall. I go as fast as I can, which isn’t very. Two more guards are down. We secure them, disarm them, pull the batteries out of their phones and fling them back toward the storeroom. I tell the brothers to get the fuck out of here.
We take the shotguns out of the bags. I cradle the sawed-off under my arm and take two flash-bangs out of my pocket. I press myself against the wall to avoid shrapnel. Sweetness angles himself away from the door to do the same. We do it fast. He fires and kicks the door open. The roar is deafening in this confined space. I pull the pins on the grenades and toss them into the room, turn, plug my ears and close my eyes. Three seconds. Thunders like the cracks of doom and flashes like supernovas.
We charge in. Some made it under the table when the door flew open. Those standing went down. Six players at the table. Two gunmen bodyguards. They’re all deaf, blind and disoriented. A couple puke from inner-ear-liquid imbalance. We start screaming. “Everybody facedown on the floor. Lock your fingers behind your heads.”
I realize I’m shouting in Finnish. I scream it again in English. Sweetness takes my cue, shouts orders in Russian.
All but two players suck floor. A bodyguard behind the bar must have understood what was happening, closed his eyes and ears. He comes up shooting. He turns his head as I let the right barrel go. Smoke and flame blast out of it. I cut loose with only one hand gripping the gun. It almost flies out of my grasp from the recoil jolt. The guard gets his side and the back of his head scorched with rock salt. He drops his pistol. Not out of fear or pain, but because he sees what he’s done. He put a bullet square between Pasi Palo’s eyes. That won’t be forgiven. As Milo would say, before long he’ll be dead as a bag of hammers.
The only man left upright is Veikko Saukko. He’s in a chair on the right side of the poker table, resting his right elbow on it and resting his head on his hand. He’s drumming on the table with the fingers of his left hand, as if all this bores him. I guess he recognized the flash-bangs, plugged his ears and covered his eyes as well.
I chuck the spent shell and replace it with a fresh one. We keep shouting, keep the fear and confusion maximized. They think this is a heist, that we’re taking down their game. I cover the room, Sweetness goes through all their pockets, looks for weapons and electronic devices. Veikko Saukko is an arms dealer. One of the players is Arab. Another is black, so perhaps African. Each has a man of his own race beside him, I assume translators. This really is criminal planning on a global scale. None of them are packing, except for security. Their communications devices—BlackBerrys, Androids, iPads and iPhones and others—go in a pile on the table, so that they neither call for help nor record this event.
It’s a nice place for a game. The card table on the left of the room is covered in green felt. Its walnut trim has drink holders built into it. On the right side of the room, leather armchairs are arranged in a semicircle around an entertainment center. A full bar lines the back wall. Another door leads out of the room. I check it out and find a sauna.
I pat down Veikko Saukko myself and pocket his iPhone. Further, I get a pen and paper from beside the game bank, which has hundreds of thousands of dollars in it, and instruct him to write down his e-mail user name and password. I test it to make sure it’s correct. There