Stormy Waves, Sequence One: The Black Book

[Serbovia]

National Park Metro Station
Kansallispuisto
Uudenmaanlinna
Province of Kanta-Uusimaa
Republic of Uusimaa

As expected for a busy pre-Christmas Sunday in the national capital, the subway station serving the downtown's most popular park of Kansallispuisto which in turn had been preserved in the middle of the downtown's leading business and commerce districts, the National Park Metro Station was flooded with families, young couples and groups of younger and older friends eager to spend one of their two weekly days off straight at the city's heart.

A lonely man seated in the station's waiting area, a lap-top computer on his lap, wouldn't have stood out during a working day when the station's main users were salarymen- and women, but now he did stand out. He tried to avoid noticing it, however, as he accessed his computer.

He'd taken every step possible to cover his tracks. Having arrived to Uudenmaanlinna for this specific purpose by car - the train service required passengers of intercity trains to present their identification when booking tickets - the man had told his colleagues and friends that he'd just be out hiking in the countryside for the day. On his computer, he now accessed a wireless LAN system recently installed by the city's Transport Bureau to the metro network - something of a rarity in the country - which he hoped would help in his attempt to remain anonymous. Not only that, but when he connected to his chosen blog site to create an account giving fake personal information, he did so from behind seven different proxies in Uusimaa, Gotariken, Franken and again in Uusimaa.

He forced himself to avoid an instinct to glance around him nervously as he selected the files, so fittingly filenamed "blackbook" on his hard-drive, to upload them into an attachment in what would be the first and only post of his new blog account. A short introduction he'd written on the same laptop at home went into the text field, and now his online existence as Freebird would come to fruition.

The decision to do what he was doing now had required many days and nights of consideration, lamenting the state of his country and feeling regret for all that he'd seen and taken part in. All the deceptions, lies, backroom deals that were being engineered in favor of the elite against the people, against everything he believed the very idea of the Republic stood for. When his wife had left him six months ago, there'd been nothing holding him back from doing what he thought was right, no fear that retaliation would be visited upon his dearest ones if his identity was ever discovered.

Having sent the blog post, then a series of emails through an account on a webmail service he'd created under equally false pretenses, the man packed up his lap-top and checked an information billboard on a wall almost straight ahead of him. The next train of the Blue Line would come in three minutes. Good enough.

A great weight was now off his chest. Could a single man change an entire system? He was about to find out.

 

[Serbovia]

Anvil Risk Management
The Glass Towers
Uudenmaanlinna
Province of Kanta-Uusimaa
Republic of Uusimaa

"Have you read them?"

"Of course I've read them", Aleksi Salomaa replied, his back to his conversation partner as he lit up a cigarette and glared through the large windows into the darkening skyline of the Uusimaan capital in his 25-floor office of the ARM headquarters in the Glass Towers. The towers were the most recognizable landmark of Uudenmaanlinna, 53 and 50-floor twins ruling the skyline of the city's business district and beyond. "As probably have half of the Uusimaans with an Internet connection by now. The question is", Anvil's Chief Executive Officer retorted, "How much of is it true?"

"All of it.", Jari Peltonen, Chief of Public Relations for the Southern Chamber of Commerce, replied.

"Jesus fucking Christ, all of it?"

"All of it", Peltonen said again, this time in a more tense tone of voice, "Wouldn't be telling you this if I didn't know that I could count on you, after all if you don't go with this to the cops that makes you an accessory to bribing public officials, cartel fraud, corporate espionage, threatening with violence, and that's just the tip of the iceberg."

"Oh please", Salomaa said, drawing in from his cigarette, "Don't be so overdramatic. We've known each other long enough to know how this should fan out between us. What's the story behind the leak?"

The Chamber of Commerce strongman took a lighter - adorned with the symbol of the Defense Reserve Officers School as a sign of his obligatory military service, the way many reservists liked to flaunt their service record - and lit up a cigarette on his own, "Both the Provincial leadership and the Chamber's members asked me to come to you with this, but it doesn't end there. People in True Soil leadership are in jeopardy too if more of these leaks come out, as we fear that they might, or if these current claims are made accurate. We know the leak came from somewhere within the Chamber, since we're the linchpin in the System between the businesses, the cooperatives and the administration, and only someone at our end could have amassed all that information. The Police's investigating it as libel, on grounds of suspecting the Black Book to be a forgery, but we both know the truth."

Salomaa was beginning to get the picture of it. "Let me guess", he replied, "You want me to find the source of the leak before the police does."

"You've got the jist of it. And after that you'll plug the leak."