Mikael Eino – “Business Deal Gone Bad”

 Mikael Eino – “Business Deal Gone Bad”

Mikael Eino took the overnight train from Helsinki to Oulu and then rented a car for the last two hundred kilometres north. The client was a timber-processing company that had just lost a multi-million-euro supply contract with a Swedish buyer. The Swedish side claimed the Finnish wood had been contaminated with an illegal preservative. Lab results from a private firm in Stockholm supported the claim. The Finnish side insisted the samples had been switched.

Eino preferred cases that left the city. He stopped at a roadside pull-off where the road crossed a frozen river and spent twenty minutes looking at the ice and the sparse pines. Then he drove on to the mill.

The mill manager walked him through the loading dock and the sample-storage shed. Everything was logged, cameras covered the doors, and the chain of custody on the disputed shipment looked clean. Eino asked to see the footage from the night the samples left for Stockholm. The manager hesitated, then produced a hard drive.

Eino watched it twice in a small office that smelled of pine resin and coffee. On the second pass he saw the gap: four minutes where the camera on the north side of the shed showed only static. The timestamp jumped. Someone had looped the feed.

He spent the next day driving the back roads between the mill and the nearest harbour. At a small service station he found a driver who remembered a white van that had stopped for diesel at 2 a.m. three nights earlier. The driver had noticed the van’s plates were Swedish, but the man who paid had spoken Finnish with a northern accent and had paid in cash.

Eino returned to the mill with the plate number. The manager went pale when Eino read it out. The plate belonged to a subsidiary the company used for internal transfers—vehicles that were not supposed to leave the yard without dual authorisation. The authorisation log for that night was blank.

“Someone inside wanted the deal to fail,” Eino said. He did not raise his voice. “The preservative was added after the official samples were taken. The Swedish lab never saw your real wood.”

The manager asked what he should do. Eino looked out the window at the long rows of stacked timber under the low sun.

“Fire the person who signed the internal transfer order,” he said. “Then call the Swedish buyer and offer them a new shipment at a discount, with samples drawn under their own cameras. Or don’t. Either way, the wood is still good. The problem was never the trees.”

He left before the manager could offer him more money. The train south left in the evening. He bought a coffee and a rye sandwich and watched the darkening forest pass the window until the lights of the next station appeared.