Three Seconds (2 page)

    He carried on walking along the fence, which was the boundary to another reality. It was easy to breathe-he'd always liked the weather here, so much lighter, so much warmer than the run-up to a Stockholm summer, which never came.

    It looked like any other hotel. He walked through the lobby toward the expensive, tired restaurant, but then changed his mind and carried on over to the elevators. He made his way up to the eleventh floor which for some days or weeks or months was the shared home of all course participants.

    His room was too warm and stuffy. He opened the window that looked out over the vast practice ground, peered into the blinding light for a while, then turned on the TV and flicked through the channels that were all showing the same program. It would stay on until he went to bed, the only thing that made a hotel room feel alive.

    He was restless.

    The tension in his body spread from his stomach to his legs to his feet, forcing him up off the bed. He stretched and walked over to the desk and the five mobile phones that lay there neatly in a row on the shiny surface, only centimeters apart. Five identical handsets between the lamp with the slightly overlarge lampshade and the dark leather blotting pad.

    He lifted them up one by one and read the display screen. The first four: no calls, no messages.

    The fifth-he saw it before he even picked it up.

    Eight missed calls.

    All from the same number.

    That was how he'd set it up. Only calls from one number to this phone. And only calls to one number from this phone.

    Two unregistered, pay-as-you-go cards that only phoned each other, should anyone decide to investigate, should anyone find their phones. No names, just two phones that received and made calls to and from two unknown users, somewhere, who couldn't be traced.

    He looked at the other four that were still on the desk. All with the same setup: they all were used to call one unknown number and they were all called from one unknown number.

    Eight missed calls.

    Erik Wilson gripped the phone that was Paula's.

    He calculated in his head. It was past midnight in Sweden. He rang the number.

    Paula's voice.

"We have to meet. At number five. In exactly one hour."

    Number five.

    Vulcanusgatan 15 and Sankt Eriksplan 17.

    "We can't."

"We have to."

    "Can't do it. I'm abroad."

    Deep breath. Very close. And yet hundreds of miles away.

"Then we've got a bastard of a problem, Erik. We've got a major delivery coming in twelve hours."

    "Abort."

"Too late. Fifteen Polish mules on their way in."

    Erik Wilson sat down on the edge of the bed, in the same place as before, where the bedspread was crumpled.

    A major deal.

    Paula had penetrated deep into the organization, deeper than he'd ever heard of before.

    "Get out. Now."

"You know its not that easy. You know that I've got to do it. Or I'll get two bullets to the head."

"I
repeat, get out. You won't get any backup from me. Listen to me, get out, for Christ's sake!"

    The silence when someone hangs up mid-conversation is always deeply unnerving. Wilson had never liked that electronic void. Someone else deciding that the call was over.

    He went over to the window again, searching in the bright light that seemed to make the practice ground shrink, nearly drown in white.

    The voice had been strained, almost frightened.

    Erik Wilson still had the mobile phone in his hand. He looked at it, at the silence.

    Paula was going to go it alone.

Monday

    He had stopped the car halfway across the bridge to Lidingö.

    The sun had finally broken through the blackness a few minutes after three, pushing and bullying and chasing off the dark, which wouldn't dare return now until late in the evening. Ewert Grens rolled down the window and looked out at the water, breathing in the chill air as the sun rose into dawn and the cursed night retreated and left him in peace.

    He drove on to the other side and across the sleeping island to a house that was idyllically perched on a cliff with a view of the boats that passed by below. He stopped in the empty parking lot, removed his radio from the charger, and attached a microphone to his lapel. He had always left it in the car when he came to visit her-no call was more important than their time together-but now, there was no conversation ro interrupt.

    Ewert Grens had driven to the nursing home once a week for twenty-nine years and had not stopped since, even though someone else lived in her room now. He walked over to what had once been her window, where she used to sit watching the world outside, and where he sat beside her, trying to understand what she was looking for.

    The only person he had ever trusted.

    He missed her so much. The damned emptiness clung to him, he ran through the night and it gave chase, he couldn't get rid of it, he screamed at it, but it just carried on and on… he breathed it in, he had no idea how to fill such emptiness.

    "Superintendent Grens."

    Her voice came from the glass door that normally stood open when the weather was fine and all the wheelchairs were in place around the table on the terrace. Susann, the medical student who was now, according to the name badge on her white coat, already a junior doctor. She had once accompanied him and Anni on the boat trip around the archipelago and had warned him against hoping
too much.

    "Hello."

    "You here again."

    "Yes."

    He hadn't seen her for a long time, since Anni was alive.

    "Why do you do it?"

    He glanced up at the empty window.

    "What are you talking about?"

    "Why do you do this to yourself?"

    The room was dark. Whoever lived there now was still asleep. "I don't understand."

    "I've seen you OUT here twelve Tuesdays in a row now."

    "Is there a law against it?"

    "Same day, same time as before."

    Ewert Grens didn't answer.

    "When she was alive."

    Susann took a step down.

    "You're not doing yourself any favors."

    Her voice got louder.

    "Living with grief is one thing. But you can't regulate it. You're not living
with
grief, you're living
for
it. You're holding on to it, hiding behind it. Don't you understand, Superintendent Grens? What you're frightened of has already happened."

    He looked at the dark window, the sun reflecting an older man who didn't know what to say.

    "You have to let go. You have to move on. Without the routine." "I miss her so much."

    Susann went back up the steps, grabbed the handle of the terrace door and was about to shut it when she stopped halfway, and shouted: "I never want to see you here again."

    It was a beautiful flat on the fourth floor of vastmannagatan 79. Three spacious rooms in an old building, high-ceilinged, polished wooden floors, and full of light, with windows that faced out over Vanadisvagen as well.

    Piet Hoffmann was in the kitchen. He opened the fridge and took out yet another carton of milk.

    He looked at the man crouching on the floor with his face over a red plastic bowl. Some little shit from Warsaw: petty thief, junkie, spots, bad teeth, clothes he'd been wearing for too long. He kicked him in the side with the hard toe of his shoe and the evil-smelling prick toppled over and finally threw up. White milk and small bits of brown rubber on his trousers and the shiny kitchen floor, some kind of marble.

    He had to drink more.
Napij sir kurwa.
And he had to throw up more.

    Piet Hoffmann kicked him again, but not so hard this time. The brown rubber around each capsule was to protect his stomach from the ten grams of amphetamine and he didn't want to risk even a single gram ending up somewhere it shouldn't. The fetid man at his feet was one of fifteen prepped mules who in the course of the night and morning had carried in two thousand grams each from winoujcie, onboard M/S
Wawel,
then by train from Ystad, without knowing about the fourteen others who had also entered the country and were now being emptied at various places in Stockholm,

    For a long time he had tried to talk calmly-he preferred it-but now he screamed
pij do cholery
as he kicked the little shit, he had to damn well drink more from the bloody milk carton and he was going to fucking
pij do cholery
throw up enough capsules for the buyer to check and quality-assure the product.

    The thin man was crying.

    He had bits of puke on his trousers and shirt and his spotty face was as white as the floor he was lying on.

    Piet Hoffmann didn't kick him anymore. He had counted the dark objects swimming around in the milk and he didn't need anymore for the moment. He fished up the brown rubber: twenty almost-round balls. He pulled on some kitchen gloves and rinsed them under the tap, then picked off the rubber until he had twenty small capsules which he put on a porcelain plate that he had taken from the kitchen cupboard.

    "There's more milk And there's more pizza. You stay here. Eat, drink and throw up. We want the rest."

    The sitting room was warm, stuffy. The three men at the rectangular dark oak table were all sweating-too many clothes and too much adrenaline. He opened the door to the balcony and stood there for a moment while a cool breeze swept out all the bad air.

    Piet Hoffmann spoke in Polish. The two men who had to understand what he was saying preferred it.

    "He's still got eighteen hundred grams to go. Take care of it. And pay him when he's done. Four percent."

    They were very similar, in their forties, dark suits that were expensive but looked cheap, shaved heads; when he stood close to them he could see an obvious halo of day-old brown hair Eyes that were devoid of joy, and neither man smiled very often. In fact, he'd never seen either of them laugh. They did what he said, disappeared into the kitchen to empty the mule who was lying there, throwing up. It was Hoffmann's shipment and none of them wanted to explain to Warsaw that a delivery had gone all wrong.

    He turned to the third man at the table and spoke in Swedish for the first time. "Here are twenty capsules. Two hundred grams. That's enough for you to check it."

    He was looking at someone who was tall, blond, in shape, and about the same age as he was, around thirty-five. Someone wearing black jeans, a white T-shirt and lots of silver around his fingers, wrists, and neck. Someone who'd served four years at Tidaholm for attempted murder, and twenty-seven months in Mariefred for two counts of assault. Everything fit. And yet there was something he couldn't put his finger on, like the buyer was wearing a costume, or was acting and not doing it well enough.