Three Seconds (3 page)

    Piet Hoffmann watched him as he pulled a razor blade from the pocket of his black denim jacket and cut one of the capsules down the middle then leaned forward over the porcelain plate to smell the contents.

    That feeling again. It was still there.

    Maybe the guy sitting there, who was going to buy the lot, was just strung out. Or nervous. Or maybe that was precisely what had made Piet call Erik in the middle of the night, whatever it was that wasn't right, this intense feeling that he hadn't been able to express properly on the phone.

    It smelled of flowers, tulips.

    Hoffmann was sitting two chairs away but could still smell it clearly.

    The buyer had chopped up the yellowish, hard mass into something that resembled powder, scooped some up on the razor blade and put it in an empty glass. He drew twenty milliliters of water into a syringe and then squirted it into the glass and onto the powder which dissolved into a clear but viscous fluid. He nodded, satisfied. It had dissolved quickly. It had turned into a clear fluid. It was amphetamine and it was as strong as the seller had promised.

    "Tidaholm. Four years. That's right, isn't it?"

    It had all looked professional, but it still didn't feel right.

    Piet Hoffmann pulled the plate of capsules over in front of him, waiting for an answer.

    "Ninety-seven to two thousand. Only in for three. Got out early for good behavior."

    "Which section?" Hoffmann studied the buyer's face.

    No twitching, no blinking, no other sign of nerves.

    He spoke Swedish with a slight accent, maybe a neighboring country. Piet guessed Danish, possibly Norwegian. The buyer stood up suddenly, an irritated hand slightly too close to Piet's face. Everything still looked good, but it was too late. You noticed that sort of thing. He should have got pissed off much earlier, swiped that hand in front of his face right at the start:
Don't you trust me, you bastard.

    "You've seen the judgment already, haven't you?"

    Now it was as if he was
playing
irritated.

    "I repeat,
which section?"

    "C. Ninety-seven to ninety-nine."

    "C. Where?"

    He was already too late.

    "What the fuck are you getting at?"

"Where?"

    "Just C, the sections don't
have
numbers at Tidaholm."

    He smiled.

    Piet Hoffmann smiled back.

    "Who else was there?"

    "That'll fucking do, okay?"

    The buyer was talking in a loud voice, so he would sound even more irritated, even more insulted.

    Hoffmann could hear something else.

    Something that sounded like uncertainty.

    "Do you want to get on with business or not I was under the impression that you'd asked me here because you wanted to sell me something."

"Who else was there?"

    "Skane. Mio. Josef Libanon. Virtanen. The Count. How many names do you want?"

    "Who else?"

    The buyer was still standing up, and he took a step toward Hoffmann. "I'm going to stop this right now."

    He stood very close, the silver on his wrist and fingers flashing as he held his hand up in front of Piet Hoffmann's face.

    "No more. That's enough. It's up to you whether we carry on with this or not."

    "Josef Libanon was deported for life and then disappeared when he landed in Beirut three and a half months ago. Virtanen has been put away in a maximum security psychiatric unit for the past few years, unreachable and dribbling due to chronic psychosis. Mio is buried-"

    The two men in expensive suits with shaved heads had heard the raised voices and opened the kitchen door.

    Hoffmann waved his arm at them to indicate that they should stay put.

    "Mio is buried in a sandpit near Alstaket in Varmdo, two holes in the back of his head."

    There were now three people speaking a foreign language in the room. Piet Hoffmann caught the buyer looking around, looking for a way out.

    "Josef Libanon, Virtanen, Mio. I'll carry on: Skane, totally pickled. He won't remember whether he did time in Tidaholm or Kumla, or even Hall for that matter. And as for the Count… the wardens in Harnosand remand cut him down from where he was hanging with one of the sheets around his neck. Your five names. You chose them well. As none of them can confirm that you did time there."

    One of the men in dark suits, the one called Mariusz, stepped forward with a gun in his hand, a black Polish-made Radom, which looked new as he held it to the buyer's head. Piet Hoffmann
utspokoj sir do diabla
shouted at Mariusz; he shouted
utspokoj sir do diabla
several times, Mariusz had better
utspokoj sir do diabla
take it easy, no fucking guns to anyone's temple.

    Thumb on the decocking lever, Mariusz pulled it back, laughed, and lowered the gun. Hoffmann carried on talking in Swedish.

    "Do you know who Frank Stein is?"

    Hoffmann studied the buyer. His eyes should be irritated, insulted, even furious by now

    They were stressed and frightened and the silver-clad arm was trying to hide it.

    "You know that I do."

    "Good. Who is he?"

    "C. Tidaholm. A sixth name. Satisfied?"

    Piet Hoffmann picked his mobile phone up from the table.

    "Then maybe you'd like to speak to him? Since you did time together?"

    He held the telephone out in front of him, photographed the eyes that were watching him and then dialed a number that he'd learned by heart. They stared at each other in silence as he sent the picture and then dialed the number again.

    The two men in suits, Mariusz and Jerzy, were agitated.
Z drugiej strony.
Mariusz was going to move, he should be on the other side, to the right of the buyer.
Blizej glowy.
He should get even closer, keep the gun up, hold it to his right temple.

    "I apologize. My friends from Warsaw are a bit edgy."

    Someone answered.

    Piet Hoffmann spoke to whoever it was briefly, then showed the buyer the telephone display.

    A picture of a man with long dark hair in a ponytail and a face that no longer looked as young as it was.

    "Here. Frank Stein."

    Hoffmann held his anxious eyes until he looked away.

    'And you… you still claim that you know each other?"

    He closed the mobile phone and put it down on the table.

    "My two friends here don't speak Swedish. So I'm saying this to you, and you alone."

    A quick glance over at the two men who had moved even closer and were still discussing which side they should stand on to aim the muzzle of the gun at the buyer's head.

    "You and I have a problem. You're not who you say you are. I'll give you two minutes to explain to me who you actually are."

    "I don't understand what you're talking about."

    "Really? Don't talk crap. It's too late for that. Just tell me who the hell you are. And do it now Because unlike my friends here, I think that bodies only cause problems and they're no bloody good at paying up."

    They paused. Waiting for each other. Waiting for someone to speak louder than the monotonous smacking sound coming from the dry mouth of the man holding his Radom against the thin skin of the buyer's temple.

    "You've worked hard to come up with a credible background and you know that it crumbled just now when you underestimated who you were dealing with. This organization is built around officers from the Polish intelligence service and I can check out what the fuck I like about you. I could ask where you went to school, and you might answer what you've been told, but it would only take one phone call for me to find out whether it's true. I could ask what your mother's name is, if your dog has been vaccinated, what color your new coffee machine is. One single phone call and I'll know if it's true. I just did, made one phone call. And Frank Stein didn't know you. You never did time together at Tidaholm, because you were never there. Your sentence was faked so you could come here and pretend to buy freshly produced amphetamine.
So I repeat,
who are you? Explain. And then maybe, just maybe, I can persuade these two not to shoot."

    Mariusz was holding the handgrip of the gun hard. The smacking noises were more and more frequent, louder. He hadn't understood what Hoffmann and the buyer were saying, but he knew that something was about to go down. He screamed in Polish,
"What the fuck are you talking about? Who the fuck is he?"
then cocked his gun.

    "Okay."

    The buyer felt the wall of immediate aggression, tense and unpredictable.

    "I'm the police."

    Mariusz and Jerzy didn't understand the language.

    But a word like
police
doesn't need to be translated.

    They started shouting again, mainly Jerzy, he roared that Mariusz should damn well pull the trigger, while Piet Hoffmann raised both his arms and moved a step closer.

    "Back off!"

    "He's the police!"

    "I'm going to shoot!"

    "Not now!"

    Piet Hoffmann lurched toward them, but he wouldn't make it in time, and the man with the metal pressed against his head knew. He was shaking, his face contorted.

    "I'm a police officer, for fuck's sake, get him off me!"

    Jerzy lowered his voice and was
b/ii4
almost calm when he instructed Mariusz to stand closer and to z
drugiej strony
swap sides again-it was better to shoot him through the other temple after all.

    He was still lying in bed. It was one of those mornings when your body doesn't want to wake up and the world feels a long way off. Erik Wilson breathed in the humidity.

    The south Georgia morning air that slipped in through the open window was still cool, but it would soon get warmer, even warmer than yesterday. He tried to follow the fan blades that played on the ceiling above his head, but gave up when he got tears in his eyes. He'd only slept for an hour at a time. They had talked together four times through the night and Paula had sounded more and more tense each time, a voice with an unfamiliar edge, stressed and desperate, on the verge of fleeing.

    He had heard familiar sounds from the great FLETC training grounds for a while now, so it must be past seven o'clock, early afternoon in Sweden-they would be done soon.

    He propped himself up, a pillow behind his back. From his bed he could look out through the window at the day that had long since dawned. The hard asphalt yard where the Secret Service had protected and saved a president yesterday was empty, but the silence after a pretend gunshot still reverberated. A few hundred meters away, in the next practice ground, a number of bright-eyed Border Patrol officers in military-like uniforms were running toward a white and green helicopter that had landed near them. Erik Wilson counted eight men clambering on board, who then disappeared into the sky.

    He got out of bed and had a cold shower, which nearly helped. The night became clearer, his dialogue with fear.

    I want you to get out.

    You know that I can't.

    You risk ten to fourteen years.

    If I don't complete this, Erik, if I back out now, if I don't give a damn good explanation… I risk more than that. My life.

    In each conversation and in many different ways, Erik Wilson had tried to explain that the delivery and sale could not be completed without his backing. He got nowhere, not with a buyer and the seller and mules already in place in Stockholm.