Three Seconds (22 page)

    He had cleaned the sink meticulously, but he still found some remains from yesterday that had gotten stuck to the edges of the metal plughole. The unplanned shooting and mules who, in a panic, had to be emptied in the one place they must never be linked to. He turned on the tap and let the hot water run while he picked off the last bits of vomit and milk and brown rubber.

    The fireproof gloves were in one of the drawers with the cutlery. He laid a tulip on each one and put them into the oven, with the round buds nearest to the door. He loved the moment when it happened. Spring and life encapsulated on the end of a green stem. The buds suddenly woke up in the warmth of the oven and revealed their true color for the first time.

    He took them out when they were just a couple of centimeters open, he had to be careful not to wait too long, to lose himself in the beauty, color and life.

    He put them down on the worktop and took out the box of condoms-no ribs and no lubricant and definitely no scent-and carefully poked half a condom down into each bud, then filled it with amphetamine, one tip of a knife at a time. Three grams in the small buds, four in the slightly larger ones, pressed it down hard to get as much as possible in. Then he popped the two amphetamine-filled tulips on a serving dish in the humming freezer between the sink and the range.

    They had to lie there in -65 degrees for ten minutes. Until the buds had closed again, gone back to sleep and hidden their glory. Only then would he move them from the freezer to a fridge regulated to 35 degrees and a long rest that would delay them flowering.

    The next time they opened it would be at room temperature on a governor's desk.

    When he wanted them to.

       Piet Hoffmann stood in his large office looking out of the window at the people and cars on Kungsbron and Vasagatan, as was his wont. He had filled fifty tulips with a total of 185 grams of 30 percent amphetamine, without even thinking about the fact that the whitish-yellow powder had stolen years of his life and there had been a time when every waking hour was used to steal enough to get more for the next day. The rehab center, the fear, the prison sentence, the drug had been all-consuming and everything else meaningless until the morning she was suddenly standing in front of him. He had never injected since. She had forced him to hold onto her hand hard, as only people who trust each other can.

     The cigar case was lying on the desk. The digital recorder beside it.

The document- I've read it. I assumed… I assumed that it concerned a … woman?

    A recorder small enough to be transported in your anus.

    Now it was voices on the computer.

That's my name, in here.

    He copied the whole recording onto two separate CDs and put one in a brown and one in a white 8 x 10 envelope. He took down four passports from the top shelf in the gun cabinet, put three of them in the brown envelope and the fourth in the white envelope. Finally, he got out two small transmitters and two earpieces and put one in each envelope.

    "It's me."

    He had dialed the only number stored on the mobile phone.

    "Hello."

    "Västmannagatan. Your colleague's name, I've forgotten it. The guy who's investigating."

    "Why?"

    "Erik, I've only got thirty-five hours left."

    "Grens."

    "His whole name."

    "Ewert Grens."

    "Who is he?"

    "I don't like the sound of this. What are you up to?"

"For Christ's sake, Erik. Who?"

    "One of the older ones."

    "Good?"

    "Yes, he's good. And that makes me uneasy."

    "What do you mean?"

    "He's…
he's
the sort that doesn't give up."

    Piet Hoffmann wrote the name on the front of the brown envelope in big, clear letters, then the address underneath in smaller letters. He checked the contents. A CD, three passports, one earpiece.

The sort who doesn't give up.

       Erik Wilson enjoyed the last of the sun as it sank slowly into Lake Vattern. A moment of peace after Piet's strange phone call about Ewert Grens a short while ago, and before a meeting that would make an infiltrator even more dangerous. He had sensed the change hour by hour in recent days, how Piet retreated more and more. The last conversation he had had was with someone who could only be called Paula. He knew that it was necessary and even what he preached, but it still shocked him every time someone he liked became someone else.

    He had walked the short distance from Jonkoping station to the Swedish Court Administration offices on several occasions in recent years, and if he cut down along Jarnvagsgatan and Vastra Storgatan, he could be at the heavy entrance door in just five minutes.

    He was there to manipulate the system.

    And he was good at it, at recruiting people, regardless of whether it was someone serving a sentence who could be used to infiltrate other criminal networks or a civil servant who could be used to add or delete a line or two here and there in a database. He was good at making them feel important, getting them to believe that they were helping society, as well as themselves, good at smiling when necessary and laughing when necessary and ingratiating himself with the infiltrator and informer so that they liked him more than he would ever like them.

    "Hi."

    "Thank you so much for staying late."

    She smiled, a woman in her fifties whom he had recruited several years ago in connection with a case in Gota Court of Appeal. They had met in the courtroom every day for a week, and over dinner one evening had agreed that her position gave her authority to make changes in the databases that might be of assistance to the Swedish police in their ongoing work to map organized crime.

    They walked up the steps of the imposing court building together and she waved over to the security guard
I've got a visitor,
then they continued ro Administration on the first floor. She sat down at her computer and he pulled over a chair from the neighboring empty desk and waited while she typed in her user name and password, and swiped a small plastic card along the top of her keyboard.

    "Who?"

    Her authorization card on a lanyard around her neck; she fiddled with it nervously.

"721018-0010."

      He leaned his arm on the back of her chair. He knew she liked it. "Piet Hoffmann?"

    "Yes."

    "Stockrosvägen 21, 122 32 Enskede."

    He looked at the screen and the first page of the Swedish National Police Board's records for Piet Hoffmann.

1. SERIOUS FIREARMS OFFENSES 08-06-1998

    CHAPTER 9, PART 1, SECTION 2 THE FIREARMS ACT

    2. UNLAWFUL DISPOSAL 04-05-1998 CHAPTER 10, PART 4, SPC

    3.UNLAWFUL DRIVING 02-05-1998 PART 3, SECTION 2 RTOA (1951:649)

IMPRISONMENT ONE (1) YEAR SIX (6) MONTHS

04-07-1998 SENTENCE COMMENCED

01-07-1999 RELEASED ON PAROLE

     Remaining term of imprisonment six months

    "I just want to make a couple of adjustments."

    He might have touched her back as he leaned toward the screen. Never more than that, the illusion of togetherness. They both knew what it was about, but she let herself be fooled because she needed something that resembled human contact, and he pretended because he needed someone to work for him. They used each other in the same way that a police handler and informer did, a silent agreement that was never defined, but that was a prerequisite for wanting to meet in the first place.

    "Adjustments?"

    "I want you… to add just a few things."

    He changed position, leaned back, his hand near her back again. "Where?"

    "The first page. The Österåker bit."

    "Sentenced to one year and six months."

    "Change it to five years."

    She didn't ask why. She never did. She trusted him, trusted that the detective superintendent from the crime operations unit in Stockholm was sitting close to her in the best interests of society and crime prevention. Light fingers dancing on the keyboard
as
the line with ONE (I) YEAR six (6)

    MONTHS became FIVE (5) YEARS.

    "Thank you."

    "Is that all?"

    "Next line. Convicted of serious firearms offenses. That's not enough. I want you to add a couple more offenses. Attempted murder. Aggravated assault on an officer."

    Only one computer on, only one desk lamp on in the large room on the first floor of the National Courts Administration. Wilson was aware of the risk that the woman who had stayed late was taking; while her colleagues had left long ago and were now lounging around on sofas in living rooms watching TV, she weighed the feeling of being important against the risk of prosecution and gross document forgery.

    "Now he's got a longer sentence and more
ratio decidendi.
Anything else?" She printed off the relevant page of 721018-0010's criminal record and gave it to the man who was sitting so close and made her feel alive. She waited while he read and after a while seemed to lean in even closer. "That's fine. For today."

    Erik Wilson held two pieces of paper that made the difference between respect and suspicion. Within the first hour of being inside Aspsås Prison walls, Piet Hoffmann would have to prove his convictions to insistent fellow prisoners and doing five years for ATTEMPTED MURDER AND AGGRAVATED ASSAULT ON AN OFFICER was the same as getting the security classification: powerful and capable of killing, if necessary.

    Paula would be seen
as
what he was pretending to be from the very minute he entered his cell.

    Erik Wilson stroked the smiling woman on the arm, gave her a fleeting kiss on the cheek, and she was still smiling as he rushed away to get the late train back to Stockholm.

    The house looked smaller as the dark started to gnaw at the corners.

    The facade was leached of color, the chimney and new tiled roof sank lower over the upstairs windows.

    Piet Hoffmann stood between the two apple trees in the garden and tried to see into the kitchen and sitting room. It was half past ten, it was late, but she was usually still up at this time, somewhere to be seen behind the white or blue curtains.

    He should have phoned.

    The meeting at Rosenbad had finished just after five and then spilled over into the three bunches of tulips from the flower shop and the CD copies of a recording made in a room at the Government Offices and two letters addressed to two people who would never receive them and then up into the dark loft again and eleven tins with eleven kilos of amphetamine in a bag and buds that two by two were first put in the oven, then the freezer before being put in the fridge and suddenly the evening had disappeared without him having called.

    Thirty-three hours left.

    He opened the front door that was locked. No TV humming in the sitting room, no light over the round table in the kitchen, no radio from the study and the slow P1 talk shows that she liked so much. He had come home to a hostile house, to reactions that he couldn't control and that scared him.

    Piet Hoffmann swallowed the feeling of being so totally fucking alone.

    He had actually always been lonely, never had many friends as he dropped them one by one because he didn't understand the point, didn't have many relatives as he lost touch with those who hadn't dropped him first. But this was a different loneliness, one that he hadn't chosen himself.

    He turned the light on in the kitchen. The table was empty, no blobs of jam and crumbs from
just one more cookie,
it had been wiped in circles until everything had been cleaned off. If he leaned forward he could even see the stripes from a J-doth on the shiny pine surface. They had sat there eating supper, just a few hours ago. And she had made sure that they finished their meals. He had not been there and wouldn't be part of it later either.

    The vase was in the cupboard over the sink.

    Twenty-five red tulips, he straightened the card,
I love you,
they would stand in the middle of the table where the card was visible.

    He tried to put his feet down as quietly as possible on the stairs, but every tread creaked in warning and the ears that were listening would know he was near. He was frightened, not of the anger he would confront any minute now, but of the consequences.

    She wasn't there.

    He stood in the doorway and looked into an empty room. The bedspread was still on the bed and hadn't been touched. He continued on to Hugo's room and coughs from a throat that was only five years old and swollen. She wasn't there either.