Three Seconds (27 page)

    It was going to be hardest to hide the pentyl fuse and plastic sleeve with nitroglycerine without anything showing.

    He chose the largest book,
Nineteenth Century Stockholm,
twenty-two centimeters long and fifteen centimeters wide. He cut open the front and back of the library cover and pulled out the porous paperlike filling and replaced it with the explosive and fuse, glued it up again, tidied the edges and then leafed through all six books to make sure that the hinges were properly glued and it wasn't possible to see any of the rectangular holes.

    "What's that?"

    Hugo's face popped up over the top of the desk again. The second video had finished.

    "Nothing."

    "What
is
that, Daddy?"

    He pointed at the shiny metal tin full of thirty percent amphetamine. "That? Oh… just grape sugar."

    Hugo stood there, he was in no hurry.

    "Don't you want to watch the rest? There's another video."

    "I will in a minute. There's two letters there, Daddy. Who are they to?" Inquisitive eyes had spotted the two envelopes that were lying high up in the open gun cabinet.

    "I'm not going to send them."

    "But they've got names on."

    "I'll finish them later."

    "What do they say?"

    "Shall I put the video on now?"

    "That's Mommy's name. On the white one. It looks like it. And the one on the brown one starts with an E, I can see that too."

    "Ewert. His name's Ewert. But I don't think he'll get it."

    The ninth part of
Winnie the Pooh
was about Piglet's birthday and an outing with Christopher Robin. Hugo sat down beside Rasmus again and Pier Hoffmann checked the contents of the brown envelope-a CD of the recording, three passports, and a transmitter-stamped it and put it in his brown leather bag along with the six prepared books from Aspsås library. Then, to the white envelope which Hugo had noticed had Zofia's name on-a CD, the fourth passport, and a letter with instructions-he now added 950,000 kronor, in notes, and put the envelope in his brown leather bag along with the rest.

    Fifteen hours left.

    He stopped
Winnie the Pooh,
helped the two children who were starting to heat up again put their shoes on, then went into the kitchen and the fridge and put fifty tulips with green buds into a cool box and carried this and the leather bag and two boys downstairs to the car that was parked right outside the front door, with a parking ticker tucked under the windshield wiper.

    He looked at the two red faces in the back seat.

    Two more stops.

    Then he would put them to bed, with clean sheets, and sit there and watch them until Zofia came home.

    They lay in the car while he went into the Handelsbanken branch on KungstradOrdsgatan, and down into the basement and a room full of rows of safe deposit boxes. He opened the empty box with one of his two keys and put in one brown envelope and one white envelope, locked it and emerged from the building a couple of minutes later, got in the car and drove to Hökens Gata on Sodermalm.

    He looked at them again-he was so ashamed.

    He had overstepped the boundary. The two boys whom he loved more than anything in the back seat, and amphetamine and nitroglycerine in the trunk.

    He swallowed, they weren't going to see him crying, he didn't want them to.

     He parked as close to the entrance to Hökens Gata 1 as he dared. Number four, fifteen hundred hours. Erik had already gone in from the other door.

    "I don't want to walk anymore."

    "I know. Just here, then we'll go home. I promise."

    "My legs hurt. Daddy, they really, really hurt."

    Rasmus had sat down on the first step. His hand was warm when Piet took it, he lifted him up on one arm, with the cool box and leather bag in the other hand. Hugo would have to walk up the stairs himself, like you sometimes do when you're the oldest.

    Three floors up, the door with LINDSTROM on the letter box opened from the inside at exactly the same time that his watch alarm started to bleep.

    "Hugo. Rasmus. This is Uncle Erik."

    Small hands were held out and shaken, he felt Erik Wilson's withering look:
What the hell are they doing here?

    They went into the plastic-wrapped sitting room of the flat that was being renovated, and despite being tired, they looked curiously around at all the strange furniture.

    "Why is there plastic everywhere?"

    "There's work being done."

    "What do you mean, work?"

    "They're making the flat new and they don't want things to get dirty." He left them in the rustling sofa and went into the kitchen, and another piercing look. He cocked his head.

    "I didn't have a choice."

    Wilson didn't say anything-it was as if he'd lost track when he saw two children in a world that dealt in life and death.

    "Have you spoken to Zofia?"

    "No."

    "You have to speak to her."

    He didn't answer.

    "Piet, you can make all the excuses in the world. You know that you have to. Jesus Christ, you have to fucking talk to her, man!"

    Her reactions, the ones he couldn't control.

    "This evening. When the boys have gone to bed. I'll talk to her then." "You can still back out."

    "You know I'm going to finish this."

    Erik Wilson nodded and looked at the blue cool box that Pier lifted onto the table.

    "Tulips. Fifty. They'll be yellow."

    Wilson stared at the green stems and green buds that were lying among the white, square ice packs.

    "I'll put them in the fridge. It should be about 35 degrees. I want you to look after them. And the same day that I go in through the gate of Aspsås prison, I want you to send them to the address I give you."

    Wilson put his hand into the cool box and flipped over one of the white cards with the bouquet.

"With thanks for a successful partnership, Aspsås Business Association."
"Correct."

    "And where should they be sent?"

    "Aspsås prison. The prison governor."

    Erik Wilson didn't ask anymore questions. It was better not to know. "How much longer do we have to wait?"

    Hugo had grown bored of sliding his fingers over the plastic and making it rustle.

    "Just a little while. Go back in to Rasmus. I'll be there in a minute." Wilson waited until the small feet had disappeared into the gloom of the hall.

    "You'll be arrested tomorrow, Piet. After that, we'll have no contact whatsoever. You won't communicate with me or anyone else from the city police. Until you're ready and you tell us that you want out. It's too dangerous. If anyone suspects that you're working for us… you're dead."

    Erik Wilson walked down the corridor in Homicide. He was uneasy and slowed down outside Ewert Grens's office, as he had done every time he went past in recent days, curious eyes peering into the empty office and the music that was no longer there. He wondered what the detective superintendent who was investigating the murder in Västmannagatan was up to, what he knew, how long it would take before he started asking the questions that no one could answer.

    Wilson sighed, it didn't feel right, those children, they were so young. It was his job to encourage infiltrators to take big
risks
to get the information that the police depended on, but he wasn't sure that Piet had fully understood what he had to lose. They had gotten too close, he genuinely cared about him.

If anything happens, abort.

If anyone discovers who you are, you have a new mission.

To survive.

    Wilson closed the door to his office and turned on his computer, which was not connected to the Internet for security reasons. He had explained to Piet, while the two boys pulled at their dad's arms, that he would go back to FLETC and southern Georgia in the meantime, to finish what he had been forced to interrupt a couple of days ago. He was not convinced that the man in front of him had actually been listening; he had said yes and he had nodded, but he was already on his way home to his last night of freedom for a long time. The computer screen was filled with an empty document and Erik Wilson started to write an intelligence report for the county commissioner, via Chief Superintendent Göransson, which would then be deleted from his own hard disk: a background report for the arrest of a wanted and violent criminal with three kilos of Polish amphetamine in his car trunk, a report that would not be delivered until tomorrow, as it had not happened yet.

    He had waited on his own by the kitchen table for two hours.

    A beer, a sandwich, a crossword, but he hadn't drunk, eaten, or written anything.

    Hugo and Rasmus had gone to sleep upstairs a long time ago. They had had pancakes with strawberry jam and too much whipped cream first and then he had put them to bed and opened their windows and watched them fall asleep after only a few minutes.

    He heard them now, the steps that he knew so well.

    Through the garden, up the front steps and then the creak as the door opened and he felt a tightening in the pit of his stomach.

    "Hi."

    She was so beautiful.

    "Hi."

    "Are they asleep?"

    "Have been for a couple of hours."

    "And how's the temperature?"

    "It'll be gone tomorrow."

    She gave him a light kiss on the cheek and smiled, she didn't notice that the world was about to fall to pieces.

    Another kiss, on the other side, twice, as always.

    She didn't notice that the damn floor was heaving.

    "We have to talk."

    "Now?"

    "Now."

    A slight sigh.

    "Can't it wait?"

    "No."

    "Tomorrow? I'm so tired."

    "By then it'll be too late."

    She went upstairs to change, soft trousers and the thick sweater with too-long sleeves. She was all he had ever wanted and she looked at him in silence as she curled up in the corner of the sofa and waited for him to start talking. He had thought of making food with a strong scent of either India or Thailand, opening a bottle of expensive red wine and then starting to tell her, gently, after a while, But he had realized that what was false and had to be explained became even falser when it was disguised by enjoyment and intimacy. He leaned forward, hugged her-she smelled good, she smelled of Zofia.

    "I love you. I love Hugo. I love Rasmus. I love this house. I love knowing that there's someone who calls me
my husband
and someone else who calls me
Daddy.
I didn't know it was possible. I've gotten used to it, I'm completely dependent on it now."

    She pulled herself into a ball even more and withdrew farther into the corner of the sofa. She could tell that he'd been rehearsing what he had to say.

    "I want you to listen to me, Zofia. But most of all, I want you to sit there and not leave until I have finished."

    He always knew more about every situation than those he would later share it with. If he was more prepared, he would have more control and someone who has control is always the one who decides.

    Not now.

    Her feelings, her reactions, they scared him.

    "Then- Zofia, you can do what you like. Listen to me and then do what you want."

    He sat opposite her and in a quiet voice, started to tell a story about a prison sentence ten years ago, about a policeman who had recruited him as an infiltrator and about continued criminal activity and the police who turned a blind eye, about a Polish mafia organization called Wojtek, about secret meetings in flats that were being renovated, that she had dropped off her husband and collected him from a shell company that he had called Hoffmann Security AB, about a fabricated criminal record and suspect database and prison records that described him as extremely violent and classified him as psychopathic, that the illusion that was one of Sweden's most dangerous men would be arrested tomorrow morning at six thirty in a pool hall in central Stockholm, about the expected trial and outcome, a sentence with years in prison, a life behind high walls that would start in about ten days and continue for two months, about having to look his wife and children in the eye each day and know that their trust and confidence was built on a lie.