Three Seconds (20 page)

    He let go of the microphone and placed both his hands on the table, where they were visible.

    Göransson was still looking directly at him and it was as hard to breathe as it was to swallow, each second an hour, until he looked away.

    "I can't say it anymore clearly than that. It's you who decides. Let Paula continue or stand by and watch once again."

    The state secretary looked at each of them, and then out of the window at the sun, which was so beautiful. Maybe she also longed to be out.

    "Could I ask you to leave the room?"

    Piet Hoffmann shrugged and started to walk toward the door, but stopped suddenly. The microphone. It had come unstuck and slithered down between his right leg and the material of his trousers.

    "It will only take a couple of minutes. Then you can come back in."

    He said nothing. But he held up his middle finger as he left the room. He heard a tired sigh behind him. They had observed it, were irritated, kept their eyes averted. That was what he had intended, he wanted to avoid any questions about what was being dragged behind his foot as he shut the door.

    The state secretary's face still gave nothing away.

    "You mentioned nine months. Five months. The Mexican and Egyptian mafia. I said no because the criminals you use as infiltrators can only be deemed to be high risk."

    "Paula is not a
high-risk
source. He is Wojtek's ticket to expansion. The whole operation is built around him."

    "I will never give criminal immunity to someone who neither you nor I trust."

"I do
trust him,"

    "Then perhaps you can explain to me why Chief Superintendent Göransson body-searched him out there not long ago."

    Erik Wilson looked at his boss and then at the woman with the blank face.

    "
I
am Paula's handler,
I
am the one who works with him every day. I trust him and Wojtek is already here! We’ve never managed to position an infiltrator so centrally in an expanding organization before. With Paula, we can cut them down with one fell swoop. If he's given immunity with regard to Västmannagatan. If he is allowed to operate fully from the inside."

    The state secretary went over to the window and the golden sun, and a view of the capital that was going about its afternoon business without any idea of the decisions that governed it. Then she turned and looked at the fourth participant in the meeting who had not yet said anything.

    "What do you think?"

    She had opened her door for Detective Superintendent Wilson and Chief Superintendent Göransson. But it was in decisions like this that she turned to the top man in the police authority and asked him to sit down at the table with her and listen.

    "The criminal elite, multimillionaires, major criminals as Wojtek's financiers. The criminal grass roots, those indebted, the petty thieves, as Wojtek's slaves."

    The national police commissioner had a sharp, nasal voice.

    "I don't want that to happen. You don't want that to happen. Paula doesn't have time for Västmannagatan."

    Piet Hoffmann had a couple of minutes.

    He checked the CCTV close to the elevators, and positioned himself right underneath to be certain that he was in a blind spot. He made sure that he was on his own and then undid his trousers and soon got hold of the thin microphone lead and pulled it up to his crotch and positioned it on his groin.

    The tape had dislodged.

    Göransson's hands had disturbed it when he searched him.

    A few more minutes.

    He pulled a thread loose from one of the inner seams, and with clumsy fingers tied the lead to the fabric and angled the microphone toward the zipper of his trousers, then pulled down his sweater as far as he could over the waistband.

    It was not the best solution. But it was the only one he had time for.

    "You can come in again now,"

    The door midway down the corridor was open. The state secretary waved to him and he tried to walk as naturally as he could, with short steps.

    They had decided. At least, that's what it felt like.

    "One more question."

    The state secretary looked first at Göransson, then at Wilson.

    "Just over twenty-four hours ago, a preliminary investigation was opened. I'm guessing it's being led by the city police. I want to know how you'll, er, deal with that."

    Erik Wilson had been waiting for her question.

    "You've read the report that I sent to the head of homicide."

    He pointed at the copies of the document that were still lying in front of each one of them on the table.

    "And this is the report that the investigators, Grens, Sundkvist, Hermansson, and Krantz, have written. What they know, what they've seen. Compare it with the contents of my report, with the actual events and background as to why Paula was taking part in the operation in the flat."

    She leafed quickly through the pages.

    "A real report. And one that shows how much our colleagues know."

    She didn't like it. As she read, the dead face came alive for the first time, the mouth, the eyes, as if it was warding off the contempt and a decision that she thought she would never have to consider.

    "And now? What's happened since this was written?"

    Wilson smiled, the first smile for a long time in a room that was being suffocated by its own solemnity.

    "Now? If I've understood rightly, the investigators have just found a shirt in a plastic bag in a gargabe bin near the scene of the crime."

    He looked at Hoffmann, still with a smile on his face.

    "A shirt covered in blood and gunshot residue. But… blood that's not recorded in any Swedish database. My guess is that it may be a red herring, one that will get them nowhere but that will take time and effort to investigate."

     The shirt was gray-and-white checks and had stains that now, after twenty-four hours, were more brown than red. Ewert Grens picked at it in irritation with a glove.

    "The murderer's shirr. The murderer's blood. But yet we're getting nowhere."

    Nils Krantz was still sitting in front of the image of red peaks above various numbers.

    "No identity. But maybe a place."

    "I don't understand."

    The cramped room was just as damp and dark as all the other rooms in forensics. Sven looked at the two men beside him. They were the same age, balding, not particularly jolly, tired but thorough, and, perhaps the greatest similarity, they had lived for their work until they became their work.

    The younger generation that was just starting out was not likely to ever be the same. Grens and Krantz were the sort of men who no longer had a natural place.

    "The smaller flecks of blood, the ones that belong to the murderer, don't come from anyone in our databases. But a person with no name has to live somewhere and always takes something with them when they move around. I usually look for traces of persistent and organic pollutants that are stored in the body, difficult to break down, that have a long life and don't dissolve easily-sometimes they point the investigation in the direction of a specific geographic place."

    Krantz even moved like Grens. Sven, who had never noticed it before, looked around to see if there was a sofa, suddenly convinced that the forensic scientist also stayed in his office sometimes when the light had faded and his own flat meant loneliness.

    "But not this time. There's nothing in the blood that can link your murderer to a specific place, country or even continent."

    "Damn it, Nils, you just said-"

    "But there's something else on the shirt."

    He unfolded the shirt on the workbench with great care.

    "In several places. But here in particular, at the bottom of the right arm. Flower fragments."

    Grens leaned forward in an attempt to see something that could not be seen.

    "It's Blossom. Polish Yellow."

    They were finding it more and more often in raids. The smell of tulips. Chemical amphetamine from factories that used flower fertilizer instead of acetone.

    "Are you sure?"

    "Yes. The ingredients, smell and even the yellow color, like saffron, a sulphate that gives off color in running water."

    "Poland. Again."

    "And, I know exactly where it comes from."

    Krantz folded the shirt with small movements, just as carefully as he had unfolded it.

    "I've analyzed amphetamine with exactly this composition in connection with two other investigations in less than a month. We now know that it is manufactured in an amphetamine factory just outside Siedlce, a town about a hundred kilometers east of Warsaw."

    The strong sunlight had become uncomfortably warm and made his jacket itch on his neck and his shoes feel too tight.

    It was fifteen minutes since the state secretary had left the room for a brief meeting in an even bigger room, and a decision that would mean all or nothing. Piet Hoffmann had a dry mouth and swallowed what should have been saliva, but now was anxiety and fear.

    Strange.

    A small-time dealer who had served a sentence in a locked cell in Österåker prison. A family man with a wife and two young boys whom he had come to love more than anything else in the world.

    He was someone else now.

    A man of thirty-five, sitting on the edge of a desk in a building that was the symbol of power, the state secretary's phone in his agitated hand.

    "Hi."

    "When are you coming back?"

    "Later on this evening. This meeting seems to be going on forever. And I can't leave. How are they?"

    "Do you care?"

    Her voice upset him. It was cold, hollow.

    "Hugo and Rasmus, how are they?"

    She didn't answer. She stood there in front of him-he knew every expression, every gesture, her slim hand massaging her forehead, her feet fidgeting in oversize slippers. Any minute now she would decide whether or not she could bear to carry on being angry.

    "They're a bit better. An hour ago their temperature was one-oh-one point three."

    "I love you."

    He put the phone down, looked at the people around the table and then at the clock. Nineteen minutes had passed. Damn saliva, there wasn't any, no matter how much he tried to swallow. He stretched and had started to walk toward his empty chair over at the far end of the table when the door opened.

    She was back, with a tall, well-built man, half a step behind her. "This is Pål Larsen, the director general."

    She had made her decision.

    "He's going to help us. With what happens next."

    Piet Hoffmann heard what she was saying, and should perhaps have laughed or clapped his hands.
He's going to help us. With what happens next.
She had made up her mind to overlook his presence which, legally, was tantamount to accomplice to murder. She was taking a risk. And deemed that it was one worth taking. He knew of at least two other occasions where she had granted a secret pardon to infiltrators who had been given a prison sentence. But he was fairly certain that she had never before chosen to overlook what she knew about an unsolved crime-solutions normally stopped at the level of the police.

    "I want to know what this is about."

    The director general of the Swedish Prison and Probation Service made it quite clear that he had no intention of sitting down.

    "You are going to-now, how did we put
it-help
us position someone." "And who are you?"

    "Erik Wilson, City Police."

    "And you think that I should help you with a placement?"

    "Pål?"

    The state secretary smiled at the general director.

    "Me. You're going to help me."

    The well-built man in a tight suit said nothing, but his body language betrayed his frustration.

    "Your task is to position Paula-the man sitting next to me here-in Aspsås prison to serve a sentence he will be given once he has been arrested for the possession of three kilos of amphetamine."

    "Three kilos? That'll be a long sentence. Then he'll have CO go to a holding prison first, Kumla, before being transferred."

    "Not this time."

    "Yes, he-"

    "Pål?"

    The state secretary had a voice that was soft but could give surprisingly harsh instructions.

    "Deal with it."