Three Seconds (15 page)

    He bent down and picked up a bag that had fallen off a smiling, sunburned old lady's cart. She thanked him and he smiled back as he listened to Sven Sundkvist pull out his chair, and then the irritating note that sounds like a tune every time you turn on the computer.

    "Ready?"

    "No."

    "I haven't got much time."

    "Ewen, I'm logging on. It takes a bit of time. There's not a lot I can do to change that."

    "You can open it faster."

    A couple of minutes of clacking on the keyboard, Grens walking restlessly between the travelers and the check-in desks, waiting for Sven's voice.

    "No hits."

    "Not anywhere?"

    "No criminal record, not in the driver's license register, he's not a Swedish citizen, his fingerprints haven't been recorded, he's not in the criminal intelligence database."

    Grens walked slowly around the bustling departures hall twice.

    But he had a name. He now knew who had been lying in a dark patch on the sitting room floor.

    It meant nothing.

    He wasn't interested in the dead man. A lifeless identity was only meaningful Wit helped him to get closer to the perpetrator. It was his job to check the name, but it wasn't to be found in any Swedish register, so it didn't make the slightest difference.

    "I want you to listen to this."

    Ewert Grens was once again sitting in the room with the oversized Danish pastries and miniature cups in Kastrup police station.

    "Not yet."

    "It's not much. But it's all I've got."

    A voice whispering seven words to the emergency services was still his closest link to the murderer.

    "Not yet, Grens. Before we carry on, I want to make sure that you are absolutely clear about the terms of this meeting."

    Jacob Andersen took the CD player and headphones but put them down on the table.

    "You didn't get any information earlier on the phone because I wanted to know who I was talking to. And whether I could trust you. Because if it becomes known that Carsten was working for us, there's a risk that other infiltrators-who he had recommended and backed for Wojtekmight also die. So what we talk about here doesn't go beyond these walls. Okay?"

    "I don't like all this cloak-and-dagger stuff surrounding informers and their operations. It interferes with other investigations."

    "Okay?"

    "Okay."

    Andersen put on the headphones and listened.

    "Someone raising the alarm from the flat."

    "I realize that."

    "His voice?" Ewert Grens pointed at the photograph on the table. "No."

    "Have you heard it before?"

    "I'd need to hear more to be able to give you a definite answer." "That's all we've got."

    Jacob Andersen listened again.

    "No. I don't recognize the voice."

    Carsten, who was called Jens Christian Toft, was dead in the picture but it felt almost like he was looking at him, and Grens didn't like it. He pulled the photo toward him and flipped it over.

    "I'm not interested in him. I'm interested in who shot him. I want to know who else was in the flat."

    "I have no idea."

    "You must've damn well known who he was going to meet for one of
your
operations!"

    Jacob Andersen didn't like people who raised their voices unnecessarily. "Next time you talk to me like that, this meeting is over."

    "But if it was you who-"

    "Understood?"

    "Yes."

    The Danish detective superintendent continued.

    "The only thing I know is that Carsten was going to meet representatives from Wojtek and a Swedish contact. But I don't have any names."

    "A Swedish contact?"

    "Yes."

    "Are you sure about that?"

    "That's the information I have.
^),

    Two Swedish voices in a flat where the Polish mafia was tying up a deal. One was dead. The other raised the alarm.

    "It was you."

    Andersen looked at Grens, taken aback.

    "Excuse me?"

    "The Swedish contact."

    "What are you talking about?"

    "I'm saying that I'm going to find the bastard."

    The house was only a couple of hundred meters from the heavy traffic on Nynäsvägen, which thundered through any thoughts. But you only had to drive down a couple of little back streets, past the school and a small park, to discover another world. He opened the car door and listened. You couldn't even hear the hum of the heavy trucks that were trying to overtake one another.

    She was standing in the driveway, waiting in front of the garage when he swung in.

    So beautiful, with her slippers still on and not enough clothes. "Where have you been? Where have the children been?"

    Zofia opened the back door and stroked Rasmus on the cheek, lifted him up in her arms.

    "Two clients, I'd forgotten about them."

    "Clients?"

    'A security guard who had to have a bullet-proof vest and a shop that needed its alarm system adjusted. I had no choice. And they didn't have to sit in the back seat for long."

    She felt both their brows.

    "They're not too warm."

    "Good."

    "Maybe they're getting better."

    "I hope so."

    I kiss her on the cheek and she smells of Zofia, as I cobble together a lie. It's so simple. And I'm good at it.

    But I can't bear to tell yet another one, not to her, not to the kids, not anymore.

    The wooden steps creaked as the two parents carried their feverish children indoors and up to bed, their small bodies under white duvets. He stood there for a while looking at them. They were already asleep, snoring and snuffling as people do when they're fighting lurking bacteria. He tried to remember what life was like before these two boys whom he loved more than anything in the world, empty days when he had only himself to think of. He remembered it well, but felt nothing, he had never been able to comprehend how what had once been so important, so strong and so absolute, was suddenly meaningless as soon as someone small had come along, looked at him and called him Daddy.

    He walked from one room to the other and kissed them each on the forehead. They were starting to get hot again, the fever burning on his lips. He went back down to the kitchen and sat on a chair behind Zofia and watched her back as she washed the dishes, which would then be put away in a cupboard in his home, her home,
their
home. He trusted her. That was what it was, he felt a trust that he had never dared dream of. He trusted her and she trusted him.

And she trusted him.

    He had just lied to her. He seldom thought about it, it was habit. He always considered the plausibility of a lie before he was even conscious that he
was
going to lie. This time the lie had been reluctant. He sat behind her and it still felt unreasonable, demanding, hard to bear.

    She turned around, smiled, stroked his chin with a wet hand. The hand that he so often yearned for.

    But now it just felt uncomfortable.

Two clients, I'd forgotten about them. And they didn't have to sit in the back seat for long.

    What if she hadn't trusted him?
I don't believe you.
What if she hadn't accepted his lie?
I want to know what you've really been up to.

    He would have fallen. He would have collapsed. His strength, his life, his drive, he had built it all up around her trust.

      Ten years earlier.

    He's locked up in Österåker prison, just north of Stockholm.

    His neighbors, his mares for twelve months-they all have their own way of living with the shame. They have carefully constructed their defense, their lies.

    The man opposite, in cell 4, a junkie who stole to pay for his habit, who burgled fifteen houses a night in some suburbs, and his damned insistence that
I never hurt children, I always shut the door to their room, I never steal anything from them;
his mantra and defense to help him bear the shame, a home-made set of morals that made him seem a little better than he was, to himself at least, that kept self-loathing at bay.

    Piet knew, just like everyone else knew, that the man in cell 4 had pissed on that morality long ago. He stole whatever he could sell, from the children's rooms as well, because the need for drugs was stronger than his self-respect.

    And the man farther down in cell 8, who had been sentenced for assault so many times, who had devised another life lie, his own moral with another mantra, to keep himself afloat:
I never hit women, only men, I would never hit a woman.

    Piet knew, just like everyone else knew, that the man in cell 8 had separated word from deed long ago. He hit women too, he hit anyone who crossed his path.

     Made-up morals.

    Piet had scorned them, just as he had always held those who lied to themselves in contempt.

    He looked at her. The soft hand had been uncomfortable.

    He only had himself to blame. He had trampled all over his own morals, the very reason he was still someone he liked: my
family, I will never use my family for lies, I will definitely never force Zofia and the boys to get caught up in my lies.

    And now he'd done it, just like the man in cell 4 and the man in cell 8 and all the others he had despised.

    He had lied to himself.

    There was nothing left of him that he could like.

    Zofia turned off the water-she was done. She wiped around the sink and then sat down on his knee. He held her, kissed her on the cheek, twice like she always wanted, he burrowed his nose in the dip between her neck and shoulder, staying where the skin was softest.

    Erik Wilson opened an empty document on the computer that he only used after a meeting with an infiltrator.

M pulls a gun

(Polish 9mm Radom)

from shoulder holster.

M cocks the gun and holds it to

the buyer's head.

    He tried to remember and write down Paula's account from their meeting at number five.

    To protect him. To protect himself.

    But more than anything, to have a reason for paying out police reward money, should anyone ask why and when. Without an intelligence report and the pot for rewarding information from the general public, Paula would not be paid for his work or be able to remain anonymous and off the official payroll, nor would any of his colleagues.

P orders M to calm down.

M lowers the gun, takes a step

back, his weapon half-cocked.

    When the confidential intelligence report left his desk and was taken to the commissioner of the county criminal police, via Chief Superintendent Göransson, Wilson would delete it from the computer hard disk, activate the code lock and turn off the machine, which was not connected to the Internet for security reasons.

Suddenly the buyer shouts

"I'm the police."

    Erik Wilson wrote it, Göransson checked it and the county commissioner unit kept it.

    If anyone else read it, if anyone else knew… the infiltrator's life was at risk. If the wrong people found out about Paula's identity and operations, it would be as good as a death sentence.

M again aims the gun

at the buyer's head.

    The Swedish police would not strike this time. They would not arrest anyone, or seize anything. The Västmannagatan 79 operation had had one single purpose: to strengthen Paula's position in Wojtek, a drug deal as part of Wojtek's day-to-day business.

P tries to intervene and

the buyer screams "police."

M holds the gun harder to

the buyer's head and pulls the trigger.