Knock Knock

by Anders Roslund

  He stared out through the kitchen window at their peaceful suburban neighborhood.

  The reality that made sense—unlike the one that didn’t.

  An organization with access to a weapon that didn’t exist, whose goal was to take over arms smuggling, who had chosen a retired criminal and former infiltrator named Piet Hoffmann to execute their plan.

  He watched the blackbird in the apple tree flying from branch to branch, singing just for him. The great tit had flown away, and in its place was a wagtail strutting around on the lawn, searching for insects or earthworms. More reality that made sense.

  He knew most of what there was to know about the underworld of Stockholm. He’d belonged to it for most of his adult life. But he’d never encountered such resourceful criminals. Their reach extended not only to a legendary weapon, but also to a high-ranking police officer. There was no other way to interpret the copies of highly classified documents they’d sent to his office. Documents like that were stored in a safe in the Kronoberg Police Station. Only a police officer would have been able to gain access to it.

  It was one thing to fight the police—he’d done it for years.

  It was another thing to fight criminals—he’d done that just about as long.

  But to fight them both from the very beginning. The combination could lead only to a violent death.

  A new glass of ice-cold water. For a moment the stabbing inside him almost ceased.

  That goddamned fucking phone—he didn’t want anything to do with it, and yet he had to carry it with him constantly—it had even rang when he got home with the boys from school. He picked it up, held it in front of him, and didn’t answer. It rang later in the evening. Zofia had looked at him, annoyed by the endless ringing, but she didn’t ask questions she knew she wouldn’t get answers to.

  At half past one, at almost the same moment the church bells struck, when he still hoped he might get some sleep, the first text message had arrived. He’d turned the phone on silent when he went to bed, expecting them to make contact and not wanting to wake Zofia, but the vibration on his bedside table was enough.

  We are watching you. We know where to find you. We know where your children sleep. But you have no fucking clue where we are. Answer when we call.

  Just before half past two, the next message had arrived.

  Trouble sleeping? Tomorrow will be easier. Then you’ll know where to pick up the weapon, and when to use it. Then you’ll feel calm again. And while you’re on your little mission, we’ll make sure your family is having a good time. Make sure nothing happens to them. Until you’ve done what you’re supposed to do and things go back to normal. Don’t you agree that blackbirds have the most beautiful song?

  He sat down at the kitchen table, took out the phone, and read through the only text messages it had ever received—maybe he’d see something new this time, figure out something he’d missed a few hours ago? No. It meant what it meant. We see you. We are with you all the time. This wasn’t about using any of his skills as an infiltrator, yet. It wasn’t about blowing up his family, yet—they knew as well as he did that grenades came with three fail-safes and each required a great deal of strength. The ring clip had to be pulled out, the fuse bar pressed down, and the grip fuse folded forward. And the probability that Rasmus, if he’d discovered it in the backpack’s side pocket, would accidentally have set it off was quite small. What this was about was pushing him toward a willingness to do whatever they asked, no matter the consequences.

  They were doing what he would have done.

  And they were threatening him with the old records his handler Erik Wilson filed after their meetings, which were always kept locked away in the police station.

  Erik?

  Piet Hoffmann hadn’t even wanted to consider the possibility before.

  Could Erik be the police officer who had shared papers that were more dangerous than weapons?

  No.

  Piet Hoffmann didn’t even have to take that fleeting thought any further, didn’t need to confront him—he just knew it wasn’t him. Erik Wilson, after more than ten years of close collaboration, where each day literally separated life from death, was one of only two police officers he trusted. There were thirty thousand people employed by that police authority, and there were twenty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight of them that he didn’t trust.

  They were acting and thinking as he would have.

  Even the mission they were trying to get him to carry out seemed familiar.

  In fact it was almost exactly the same as one he came up with—use a weapon no one in the criminal underworld of Stockholm had access to—several years ago for completely different reasons, when he’d planned to destroy another organization in a single stroke. He’d infiltrated a biker gang that was considered one of Sweden’s most dangerous at the time. The members who slowly accepted him, entrusted him with tasks, eventually elevating him to “hanger-on” and then “prospect,” had suddenly started showing suspicion. He remembered one evening, during one of his secret meetings with Erik Wilson, when he was supposed to share information but was just as likely to share his joy or sorrow or fear or frustration or whatever feeling filled him at the moment, he had described to his handler exactly how he planned to survive if the gang members ever found out who he was. If they ever decided to kill the snitch.

  My God.

  That was why. That’s where it came from.

  With the blackbird singing in the tree outside, and the unsolved crossword lying in front of him on the kitchen table, he suddenly saw it all so clearly.

  That’s how this all went down, that’s why this still anonymous organization threatening to destroy his family had chosen him.

  They’d read those old classified documents, copied them, and sent them to him to let him know. His meetings with Wilson—the conversations where they found the inspiration, which they adapted for their own purposes: taking over the Swedish illegal arms trade.

  It was his idea all along.

  The infiltrator Piet Hoffmann, code name Paula, had realized how simple it would be to knock out a large criminal organization and in a single move completely change the balance of power in Stockholm’s underworld.

  Hoffmann knew he was right. This was exactly how it went down. But still he rose from the kitchen table and headed toward the stairs—not to go up to his bed and Zofia’s warm body and deep and even breathing—but to go to the basement and his hidden room. That’s where he’d stashed those fucking copies they’d sent him two days ago. Hoffmann put in the code and opened the safe door, and on the upper shelf there lay the stack of tightly written and highly classified documents. He hadn’t read them closely when he opened the letter, it didn’t seem necessary, but he would now.

  “They’re close, Erik. Asking questions. And I’m out of good answers.”

  “How close?”

  “Days. Maybe hours. You have to extract me.”

  “I need more time.”

  “If they find out—we both know what will happen. They’ll kill Rasmus. Then Hugo. Then Zofia. Then me. Always from the bottom up. Always youngest to oldest.”

  He sank down onto the floor, his back against the safe, and flipped through those long-forgotten notes.

  “And if I can’t get you out?”

  “You HAVE TO, Erik.”

  “IF. IF I don’t have time. What’s your plan?”

  “Then I’m taking out the whole damn club. Every single one of them. The whole fucking organization. At the same time.”

  “I’m serious—what does your plan look like?”

  “Listen: that IS my plan.”

  It didn’t take long to find the pages he sought, they even had a tiny fold in one corner, as if whoever sent them didn’t want him to miss them.

  “Erik, I’ve been working late. At night, when my biker friends are getting be
auty sleep, I’ve been going to a garage in Alby and working on the biggest mine this country has ever seen. Two meters wide. It took a lot of Dynamex B—if you only knew how easy it was to get it from construction sites. Then ship plate and fifty boxes of M12 nuts. It’s parked outside their club right now, loaded into a truck with a billboard for a strip club. Hidden INSIDE the billboard itself. Best camouflage imaginable. I rented the truck and parked it fifty meters from the biker gang’s headquarters. The idiots even talk about it, think it’s so fucking funny to see a naked lady on the ad whenever they step outside. I can trigger the bomb whenever I want with just a little detcord, an electric lighter, and a couple of cell phones. It would tear the fucking clubhouse to shreds—nobody would survive it.”

  “What . . . what the hell are you talking about?”

  “If the police can’t protect their employees, then their employees are gonna have to protect themselves.”

  “Have you . . . have you completely lost your goddamn . . . JESUS CHRIST, YOU CAN’T while you’re working for us, for THE POLICE, you can’t build a goddamn weapon of mass destruction! You’d start a fucking gang war! You have to abort this immediately. RIGHT NOW! Take that shit away!”

  “I’ll take it away. When me and my family are safe. When you’ve extracted me.”

  Six years ago. And every word from that meeting had been recorded and subsequently transcribed by his handler, just like always.

  “You’re my best infiltrator. You’ve survived longer than anyone. And when you’ve been forced to break the law, I’ve cleaned up after you—every time. Because it’s in the interest of the police authorities to keep you out of there. But this, my friend . . . you’ve gone too far!”

  “I don’t intend to kill fifty people, Erik, I just want them to KNOW I can do it. IF I end up in that situation.”

  “It’s too much, too far—for some incomprehensible reason, I let you go too far!”

  “If anything is incomprehensible it’s that no one else has realized how easy it would be to change the balance of power. Take over somebody’s territory. What a catastrophe it would be for any gang if some other fucking gang was sitting on a high-precision weapon of this caliber. Just take, for example, this fucking biker club I infiltrated—it’s common knowledge that they have a weekly meeting in their head office on Wednesdays at three. Not behind bulletproof walls—but in a fucking metal shack that I could destroy with a homemade bomb in seconds! Hells Angels have weekly meetings and Southside has one too. And we’re in fucking Sweden! I can pop into the town hall in any city, look at the drawings and plans for these clubs’ buildings because it’s public information. Everything is available—ceiling, wall thicknesses—anyone can do it. I’ve done it time and time again. You cops should do it too. Have a little fun, Erik, go in and take a look at Bandido’s new premises or Evil Crew and one thing is for sure—none of them have any reinforcements. They’re too lazy. And it’s never been a problem. Plus it’s expensive. And where do you even get a hold of it. I’ll say it again—if I wanted to go to war for real with any of the big criminal organizations, I’d knock them out in one blow. On my own. Park my homemade device, watch the clock, knowing that they’re having their little weekly meeting, that they’re all sitting down inside. Light that shit up with nothing more than an internet camera and a remote control.”

  Piet Hoffmann remembered those days, that meeting. Those doubled emotions. Tangible panic, palpable fear, and adrenaline burning inside him so clear and clean. But reading it now so long afterward, line by line, felt like meeting those faded school photos he’d shown Rasmus and Hugo of himself at their age, which made them laugh so hard. A stranger, that’s what he saw. The very young man he’d once been, whom he could barely understand or relate to now. A gaze he didn’t dare meet, because the school-age version of himself would also see the same stranger.

  And the notes, which he placed back onto the safe shelf now, were from that very person. One who wouldn’t let him go. Who found his way back in. No matter how many times Piet pushed him away. This Piet Hoffmann had been forced to run for his life over and over again, because of the infiltrator Paula.

  He closed the safe door, then the door to his secret room, then the closet and his office, then the basement door. In the kitchen he put a dented and discolored kettle on the stove to boil some water, the one they’d bought the day they moved into this house, which they could never quite give up. He poured hot water into a big glass and mixed in some instant coffee.

  Suddenly he felt so dizzy he had to lean against the wall.

  He’d been expecting this moment for most of his adult life.

  The final death threat.

  That someone would get a hold of those secret documents, learn his identity. That it would be made public and his family would become a target.

  Time to choose.

  Carry out this mission—or refuse and wait for a death sentence, because any former mafia associates of his would lose all credibility if they didn’t kill him now.

  He looked down again at Zofia’s crossword puzzle, picked up her pencil. She’d sensed it, of course—knew him better than he knew himself—and knew this night was approaching. He counted a total of nine empty squares scattered throughout the puzzle. But solving them was still just as impossible. No answer made sense. He couldn’t focus his thoughts—they danced around him, laughing at him.

  As empty as those crossword squares.

  Until, after a while, not yet sure why, he stretched over to the counter between the refrigerator and the stove and pulled some white napkins out of a drawer. He unfolded one over the puzzle and drew some aimless straight lines, which soon turned into squares. The first was in the napkin’s upper left corner. The next one right next to it. He continued, scribbling them down one at a time, a long chain from one side to the other.

  And suddenly he knew why.

  He started writing with that blunt lead pencil. It was a bit cramped, the long row was a little too close to the napkin’s edge, but the words fit exactly in the first box.

  Survive, eleven letters

  He filled it in. He could solve this.

  P—H—O—N—E—T—O—G—R—A—M

  The next row of penciled-in boxes was not quite as straight, and a little shorter with less room to write.

  Survive, eleven letters

  He knew that one, too.

  G—R—O—U—N—D—F—L—O—O—R

  He kept going.

  Still dizzy, but his mind was crystal clear.

  Now and then he’d hear one of the people he loved snore, or mumble a bit, from upstairs. In the meantime the dawn sky was getting brighter, and his big glass of coffee ran out.

  Survive, fourteen letters

  N—A—S—O—L—A—B—I—A—L—F—O—L—D

  Survive, seven letters

  D—E—T—C—O—R—D

  Survive, eleven letters

  R—A—D—I—O—J—A—M—M—E—R

  Survive, eleven letters

  P—O—S—I—T—I—O—N—I–N—G

  Survive, fourteen letters

  E—N—C—R—Y—P—T—I—O—N—C—O—D—E

  The seemingly random scribbles—squares linked together like train cars, now filled with letters—were the exact opposite. Intentional coincidences. A clear plan.

  The plan he’d been carrying inside him since he found a grenade in his youngest son’s backpack, and it had become more elaborate as the threats intensified.

  He’d already made up his mind.

  No more criminal activity.

  No more work for someone else’s sake, not organized crime and not the police. He’d learned that lesson from both sides. If he gave in even once, he was stuck, expected to continue. Criminals, cops, it worked the same, squeeze until there was nothing left to squeeze.

  He’d been given a choice—and he chose not to choose.


  He chose not to carry out the mission.

  He chose not to wait around for death.

  He kissed Luiza on her belly, and for a moment her little hand let go of the post of her crib. He kissed Rasmus’s forehead, and his youngest son paid him no mind. He kissed Hugo’s cheek, and his oldest son opened his eyes, a flash of worry, but then he turned over and went back to sleep. Zofia he held gently, put his head in her arms, lay there a moment until his breath against her sleep-warm skin woke her.

  “Piet?”

  “Sorry, but I had to wake you up.”

  “What’s . . . Are you dressed? What time is it?”

  “A quarter to six.”

  She sat up a bit, balling up the pillow behind her neck.

  The dawn light was shining more intensely up here than in the kitchen, the blinds ineffective since the window was open.

  “I have to take care of a few things, and I won’t be back until tomorrow.”

  “You’re going? Right now?”

  “While I’m gone you and the children cannot leave the house.”

  She looked at him.

  She knew.

  Not what, but she knew.

  “This is about that package you got, isn’t it? The phone you wouldn’t answer? The toy that Rasmus claims he found in our mailbox, which you took away from him without an explanation?”

  She’d told him before that he—once the master of it, since he did it to her every day—had gotten rusty at lying. And she was right. Lying, just like everything else, is about practice, consistency. It had to be second nature to him in order not to be noticed.