Three Minutes

by Anders Roslund

  “And if not—what the hell are you gonna do about it? Run to the liquor store and buy a bottle of consolation? Get out of there, you stupid fuck!” He slammed his baton hard against the roof of the car. Then again. And again. It was that sound that destroyed what remained of Grens’s patience. He threw open the car door, knocking the driver onto the asphalt, then jumped with unexpected force out of the driver’s seat and pointed his gun at the spitting, swearing man on the ground.

  “Drop your baton!”

  And suddenly it was as if everything froze.

  “And turn over onto your stomach!” Complete silence. He heard it now. No honking anymore. “You do whatever the hell I say!” Grens cocked and aimed toward his legs.

  Until the driver, mumbling, reluctantly turned over. “Fucking hell . . . a man like you should stay off the booze.”

  Traffic stood still, a line of cars all the way to City Hall, as the sirens echoed between the buildings and the rotating blue lights reflected against the plastered facades.

  “Here they come, cabbie. My backup. They’ll pick you and your friend up.”

  The police car used all four lanes of the road, winding its way through vehicles and curious onlookers. Two younger colleagues in uniform. Grens guessed they were cadets. They opened their doors simultaneously and stepped out with guns held high.

  “Drop your gun!”

  Grens looked at them, didn’t recognize them. And they looked at him, didn’t recognize him either. “I’m a police officer—and I’ve arrested this man.” Grens made sure they were able to see his weapon, kept it pointed at the man on the ground. If they were to misunderstand the situation, get the idea that he was aiming at them, they’d do what so many of his younger colleagues might do—shoot first and ask questions later.

  “Watch out!” The taxi driver had turned his head, lifted himself a bit, as he screamed. “He’s wasted and armed!”

  “Put the gun down and get on the ground—face down!”

  “I’m Grens, with City Police, I—”

  “Drop the gun or I’ll shoot!”

  They don’t know who I am. I won’t shoot them. But they will shoot at me.

  Grens was as careful as before to make sure his colleagues could see exactly what he was up to as he emptied the chamber of the gun and let the magazine fall to the ground onto the cab driver. Then he took the cylinder out and emptied the bullet there. It bounced off the face of the cab driver and onto his shoulder. Then Grens got down onto his sore leg and gently placed his service weapon on the ground. “Everything according to the rule book—which I’ve been following since before you were born.”

  “For the last time—get on the ground! Put your hands behind your back!”

  “In that case, you can borrow my handcuffs. They’re in the car, in the glove compartment, right next to where I just put my badge.”

  “Shut up and don’t move!” The hard steel of handcuffs chafed around Grens’s wrists. “Now you can get up again.”

  With his hands behind his back, that was no easy task for a man past his prime. His colleagues grabbed him by the upper arms, pulled him up in order to inspect him, patting Grens’s jacket and pant legs, while speaking to the taxi driver still lying on the ground.

  “Did you call this in?”

  “No. The driver who did is standing over there.”

  The young cadet waved the other taxi driver over. “Can you come here?”

  He didn’t have to ask twice. The driver who’d sped past other cars just before a traffic island and then forced his way back into their lane, causing the other cars to brake in panic, now sped up again, jogging forward.

  “You called this in?”

  “Yes, this asshole—”

  “What you reported seems to be true. The whole car stinks of alcohol.”

  The taxi driver’s voice almost cracked with uncontrolled excitement as he turned to Grens. “What did I tell you, you fucking drunk!”

  Ewert Grens hadn’t said a word since they’d told him to lie down, it was as if all his energy had leaked out with the wine. But now it returned. “For fuck’s sake! Those are—were—two bottles of 1982 Moulin Touchais, and they cost me five thousand three hundred and fifty kronor! So don’t tell me it stinks!” He continued, turning to the young police officer. “And I haven’t drunk a drop of them. Now, release me and deal with the men who are guilty of reckless driving and assault and not detective superintendents.”

  The other cadet, meanwhile, had opened the door to Grens’s car, searched through the glove compartment, and, just as Grens claimed, found the handcuffs and a leather case containing his police badge. “Well, that seems to be true. According to this, he is a police officer.”

  “For thirty-nine years!”

  He examined the plastic card, fingering the metal shield. “Grens. Ewert Grens? Is that your name?”

  “That’s none of your goddamn business.”

  A sigh, deep and theatrical, as the young officer took out his phone.

  “Okay.” And dialed a number that Grens tried to read without success. “If that’s how you want it, then I won’t give a damn who you are. Because nobody, and I mean nobody, talks to me like that. So now we’re calling the top, Superintendent, no fucking special treatment.”

  Someone answered and Grens was close enough to hear an electronic voice.

  “Welcome to the prosecutor’s office.”

  “Can you put me through to the chief prosecutor?”

  A few rings. Then a clear, substantial voice.

  “Ågestam, City Prosecution.”

  It was hard to tell if the chief prosecutor was speaking unusually loudly, or if the cadet deliberately angled the phone so that everyone in the vicinity could hear. Whichever it was, it worked. Grens could hear. Every word.

  “Paul Lindh, Södermalm police. Exactly fourteen minutes ago, we were located near Hornstull when we received an alarm from Taxi Stockholm. On site we have arrested a person who forced a taxi driver to the ground at gunpoint. He smells strongly of alcohol. According to his ID, which seems authentic, his name is Ewert Grens, and he’s employed by the City Police. How should we handle this?” The cadet smiled at Grens, pointed to the handset, angled it up further.

  “Did you say . . . Grens?”

  “Yes.”

  “One moment.”

  That voice. Grens knew it well. He disliked quite a few people, but he detested only one man. That fucking voice. That voice, in cooperation with internal affairs, had interrogated him at least seven times and managed to get him suspended once—Grens’s fist had gotten too close to a cabinet secretary at the Foreign Ministry who should not have contributed to the extradition of a condemned prisoner.

  “He’s been thoroughly documented by internal affairs. Possible drunk driving, did you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “And use of a lethal weapon?”

  “Yes.”

  “In that case . . . I think you better take him in to Kronoberg, and let him calm down in one of the cells on the seventh floor. I’ll get back to you.”

  The police cadet hung up and put the cell phone into his pocket. “I suppose you heard that?” And seemed quite pleased when he looked at Grens. “So—if you’d go ahead and climb into the backseat of our car, nice and quiet, then everything will be fine. Or maybe you’d prefer I help you in? In a couple of hours, after you’ve sobered up on your cell bunk, then maybe we’ll get ahold of your supervisor.”

  ERIK WILSON HAD tried to count the raindrops as they fell on the upper left half of the window. It worked at first. Until there were just too many drops to count, out of sync with the rattle of the window ledge, flowing together, so the outside world blurred, and his colleagues walking across the courtyard of the Kronoberg police station seemed coarse and clumsy, their movements difficult to interpret.

  Not long ago he’d been the one walking out there, blurring together. One step ahead in a reality that just got shittier and more violent every year. Then ever
ything changed. He’d become a superintendent. What a meaningless title. Head of the City Police’s homicide unit. An appointment officers fought for. And it had probably been some kind of reward for excellent work and ambition. The youngest superintendent ever. He’d been as flattered as anyone would be and unable to refuse the honor, even though his whole body was screaming for him to do just that, no, damn it, this is not you, but prestige and status work that way sometimes—blinding us. Now he was locked up with those who didn’t look out. Far from that reality—as a handler for confidential police informants—which had been his whole world, the sharp tip of the Swedish police force that penetrated furthest into organized crime. They were the ones who should be sitting in a prison, not him, a prisoner to the hierarchical bureaucracy of the police force.

  The phone on his desk rang. It usually did. Five rings, eight, eleven. Then it stopped, someone gave up, hung up.

  The raindrops on the window multiplied. A late summer rain. He’d just completed a final meeting with the National Police Agency’s weapons experts who were investigating the reluctance of some officers to use new ammunition called Gold Dot, which was intended to kill, rather than just stop, a criminal. Two hours of discussions about how strange it was to have to explain to police officers that the primary reason they carried weapons was to defend themselves. And soon he’d be sitting at another conference table with the politically elected head of the police board, top management’s alibi to prove that society was given some say in police work. Then a hearing with the union. And deliberations with Occupational Safety. And talks with the personnel department.

  The phone started ringing again. More times than before. He gave up, capitulated, as you do when you’re locked up. “Yes?”

  “Do you have a TV nearby?” English. An American accent.

  “Yes.”

  “Turn it on. To CNN. In about four minutes and thirty seconds.”

  That voice. It had been a long time. One of the few he trusted. He remembered a café in the main building of FLETC in Georgia, one of those oppressively hot days when everybody in uniform sought out the air-conditioned hall—it was cramped, space was limited, and she nodded when he asked if he could share her table. After an uncomfortable silence, they started chatting, which in turn grew into a conversation about things you didn’t usually talk about. He, who’d been invited along with a few other European colleagues and heads of various US law enforcement agencies, to receive further training in intelligence gathering, undercover operations, and witness protection. She, who was a career police officer, in a hurry to make her way up, in charge of the DEA’s local office in Boston. He remembered the café and the immediate sense of closeness. Sometimes that happens. You know you’ve met someone who will continue to be in your life. And that just intensifies the feeling.

  Sue Masterson.

  If she was calling, it had to be about Paula. The only thing they shared nowadays. And he wondered if it was going to be a good or a bad call. If there’d been some kind of breakthrough after a years-long police operation. Or if everything had gone to hell.

  He hurried out into the corridor, past Ewert Grens’s empty office, past Sundkvist and Hermansson, into the small break room, which held two tables and a TV on a wheeled cart. Late lunch. The most likely time to find people in here, some having a hasty cup of coffee between their stacks of case files, others slowly dipping their cinnamon buns while longing to head home. But he had to watch this alone. He almost ran out of the break room, into the corridor.

  There was also a TV in the meeting room at the end of the hall, that’s where he was headed, and when he opened the door eleven faces turned toward him. There was only one unoccupied seat. The one he should have been sitting in, answering questions from the police commission.

  The only thing he knew, come hell or high water, was that this was important. Sue Masterson was now the head of the DEA. She’d climbed all the way to the top. And she was the only one, besides himself and one American handler, who knew about the DEA’s cooperation with an informant named Hoffmann, who had worked in Sweden under the code name Paula. You have to keep that kind of knowledge limited to a very narrow circle. Because if anyone near Paula were to learn who he really was—it would be tantamount to a death sentence. Which was what happened in Sweden. Which was how he’d become El Sueco in another world. This must be serious, because Sue had just made unlawful contact—the head of the DEA would not risk revealing anything if she didn’t have to.

  Wilson apologized to the members of the police commission and closed the door. Two minutes to transmission. He ran past the elevator to the stairs that had fifty-five steps—he counted them mechanically. And now his adrenaline, his internal gauge, which he used to like—a positive conversation would make the adrenaline laugh inside him, disguised as euphoria, a negative one would make pain flash violently—was turning to stress. It wanted to rush, rush, rush through his body, but had no focus, because he still didn’t know what he was headed toward. He reached the ground floor and continued through new corridors and locked doors. The faster he moved, the slower it seemed to go. The County Communications Center. He used his access card, opened the door to a large room. The heart of the police station. The floor filled with operators in front of a sea of computers, making decisions about life and death—this was where every emergency call in Stockholm County was sent and judged. He ran between the rows of desks to a much smaller room that resembled an aquarium, glass walls around only one fish, today’s on-duty officer.

  “The staff room? Is it available?”

  “Yes.”

  “I need to borrow it for a few minutes. Okay?”

  The officer looked up from yet another computer screen, even more lights moving around, blinking. “Come with me.”

  He was tall, much taller and considerably wider than Wilson—a man who spent too much time swimming in his little glass cage and not enough in the police station’s gym—but his movements were unexpectedly agile, and he moved quickly toward a door in the corner of the hall.

  “There’s a meeting booked in here in half an hour.”

  “I’ll be done by then.”

  The officer unlocked the door, Wilson thanked him and closed it behind him, turned on the fifty-inch TV hanging on the wall next to a clean whiteboard, and went over to the window to draw the blinds.

  Barely a minute left. He flipped through SVT, TV4, BBC, Sky, until he found CNN and sat down on an uncomfortable office chair. The staff room. The crisis room. This was where they sat six weeks ago when a confrontation between the police and some rival gangs in the southern suburbs escalated into a war, four weeks ago when they told snipers to shoot the suicide bomber who’d entered one of Stockholm’s biggest department stores during the Friday rush, two weeks ago when there was a mass escape from a high-security prison. A room for chaos. Battle. Emergency. Inferno. This time he was alone. But the feeling was the same. Anything could happen. It could all go to hell. Even though he had no idea what he was about to see on the screen in front of him.

  A man. That’s what he saw. Strait-laced, trustworthy. He looked just like every other talking head at CNN, as if they were all the same person just packaged in different clothes. Atlanta, Georgia. Erik had gone there on police business the first time he trained at FLETC, it wasn’t far from the military base. A place that reminded him of where he sat now. In a crisis, in chaos and noise and under fire, something happened—employees stepped up, became more alert, sharp. A newsroom and a police station were different, but driven by the same forces. The darkness, which burned and damaged and killed, was their reason for being.

  Now. The graphics above the reporter’s shoulder changed—the image of a car crash. Above his hairline the words BREAKING NEWS spun, while another banner rotated in the opposite direction near the anchor’s hands—Speaker of the House of Representatives taken hostage. Turn after turn, while the anchor tried to say something, impossible to make out.

  “You see, Erik?” From inside his po
cket her voice came over the phone again.

  “Yes. But what . . . ?”

  “Keep watching.” Then Sue Masterson hung up, like before. A burner phone. That couldn’t be tracked. Keep watching—for what?

  There were two bottles of mineral water on the table. He opened one, drank greedily. The line of text below the studio reporter’s hands kept spinning with the same intensity. The American speaker of the house had been kidnapped? Wilson wasn’t sure he’d read that right, interpreted it correctly. Had the third most powerful politician in the United States, after the president and vice president, been taken prisoner? In that case—this was global news. Wilson knew that. But not what it had to do with him.

  The proper-looking, trustworthy but indistinguishable anchorman cut to a feature. An excited, chattering voice spoke as a detailed map of Colombia gave way to another map of its border region near the Amazonian jungle, which gave way to images of burned-out vehicles.

  The camera closed in on them, the images became more detailed. Destroyed trucks, cars, motorcycles. Outstretched blankets in the grass around them. Under those blankets—motionless bodies. Legs in suit trousers and black shoes sticking out from under the fabric, several of them. And legs in green military uniforms and heavy boots, several of them. Then legs in a dark-blue uniform with pointed boots, several of them. Wilson counted them unconsciously, as he had the steps just now. Twelve American security agents, fifteen Colombian soldiers, and fourteen Colombian special police.

  A blaring voice spoke of the war on drugs. How it was led by Speaker Crouse. About a visit to a confiscated cocaine kitchen. About PRC guerrillas who had attacked, abducted Crouse, and then an hour ago, taken responsibility. And he slowly began to understand. Not what, not how, but who.

  Colombia. Cocaine. Death.

  Paula.

  Back to the newscaster in the studio. BREAKING NEWS still written above his well-groomed head. But the text at the bottom of the screen had changed.

  America declares a new War on Terror.

  Then the next feature began—and Wilson opened the second bottle of mineral water. He was rarely thirsty, unlike Grens and his other colleagues who ran relay races between their offices and the coffee machine, but now the water streamed down his throat into his chest and stomach and down into some bottomless pit without rinsing him clean.