Three Minutes

by Anders Roslund

  A new voice and the first image—the familiar lectern of the White House, which he’d seen in countless movies, and for a moment Wilson felt himself wavering on the border between fiction and reality, a kind of hope that perhaps, just maybe, this wasn’t happening at all. But this was for real. It was reality. This was the actual president, not some movie version who’d step off the set, leave the studio, and go to some trailer to touch up his makeup for the next scene. He did what American presidents do when something serious has happened, looked straight into the camera as long as he could before pretending to look down at a piece of paper that didn’t exist, before looking up again and continuing to read from the teleprompter. A practiced pause and a lowered voice and the words the American people just like always. To the right of the president stood the vice president and then his chief of staff, and at the furthest edge stood the director of the CIA. A demonstration of power. Seriousness. As far from fiction as you could get.

  And now the American president said that an attack on one of America’s most powerful elected officials was an attack on the United States. The United States does not negotiate with terrorists. The terrorist organization PRC, which had taken responsibility, was now an enemy of the United States. The war Timothy Crouse was waging on drug trafficking had now become the United States’s war. They would now focus on destroying the PRC, that was how you won this sort of war. Destroy their organizational structure. Destroy the cocaine trade that funded them.

  “Sue?” It was the first time he had called her.

  “Wait. Soon.” She hung up. Again. And Wilson stood alone in a darkened conference room—other than an annoying stream of light that flooded through the gap where one of the curtains didn’t close tightly. He smoothed out the crease, driving away the outside world. What was happening now was for him alone, his fight, and it began three years ago when everything went to hell in a prison cell—it was his responsibility to keep the man he recruited, who against his better judgment he came to like and even care about, alive.

  New images. The lectern at the White House was replaced on the screen by some kind of deck of cards. Some kind of list. Wilson stepped closer.

  First a picture of a playing card with a red heart—the Ace of Hearts. But in the center of the card stood the word Commander-in-chief, and a face—a blurry image of a man in a large, green beret. A proud face with dark, penetrating eyes, and under that, his name: Luis Alberto Torres. And then his alias, Jacob Mayo.

  The TV announcer explained that from today, this guerrilla leader would now be at the top of America’s new Most Wanted list. A list of thirteen individuals that the FBI and CIA considered the most powerful or dangerous members of the PRC. One by one, they appeared as figures on a deck of cards. The enemy would be taken—dead or alive.

  The picture switched from the Ace of Hearts to the King of Hearts—second on the Most Wanted list, Commander Bloque Amazon. A young man with a broad scarf around his forehead and an unkempt beard, a passport photo of Juan Mauricio Ramos, alias El Médico. A new shift to the Queen of Hearts, ideologue, a woman in her forties, a black-and-white photo taken in a shadowy jungle. She was tall and thin, and according to the card her name was Catalina Herrador Sierra, alias Mona Lisa. Then the Jack of Hearts, title, hitman, with a square, indigenous face and a thick, beautiful braid, Johnny Sánchez, alias El Mestizo.

  It made for dramatic television. They all looked dangerous. And the viewer knew that they were probably doomed to die. Wilson had seen this before. During the US invasion of Iraq. They’d used a deck of cards to illustrate the fifty most wanted members of Saddam Hussein’s government. And images of the execution of the Ace of Spades, Saddam Hussein, were something that Wilson carried with him. The same pedagogy. The same strategy—define and dismantle your enemy’s organization bit by bit.

  The Jack of Hearts was followed by the Ten, Nine, then Eight of Hearts. The Commander of the Bloque Cielo became Commander of the Bloque Juanita became responsible for weapons and then in charge of explosives and ammunition. Everyone on that list was an outlaw from this point on. They had a price on their heads. A reward, dead or alive. A countdown. That’s what it felt like. Toward something. He didn’t know what. Until he did.

  On the television screen the Seven of Hearts appeared. And what Erik Wilson felt was not fear, not terror, that couldn’t encompass it. This was more like a sword plunging from the top of his head down through his chest into his abdomen. He had no children, no wife. Therefore, he’d never feared losing someone close, and as for losing himself, that had never bothered him, that day came when it came, old energy transformed into new energy. But now he felt it—the fear of losing someone he cared about, for real. He wanted to sit down. But couldn’t, his legs wouldn’t move. He wanted to stand up, that too was impossible, his legs couldn’t bear the weight. He leaned against the conference table, was held up by it.

  Seven of Hearts. Across the television screen, across most of the wall. And it felt like the playing card stayed there so much longer than the others. There was no photo, a black silhouette filled its center. Above it stood Military Instructor/Bodyguard, and under it an alias, the only name the US authorities knew: El Sueco.

  And then, from the silhouette, moving and rather blurry images of an individual shot from above emerged. From a satellite, he was sure of it, a sequence showing a man getting out of a truck, a weapon in his hand, clear that he’s protecting his freight. Wilson remembered meetings in empty apartments undergoing renovations between a handler and an informant. He remembered those life-and-death phone calls late at night, after Paula had infiltrated the upper echelons of the group and explained that it was time to strike, to eliminate.

  You. El Sueco. Paula.

  “What’s going on?” The door had opened. The on-duty officer stood there looking at him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I heard you scream, Erik.”

  He had screamed, could feel it in his throat. And he’d done it unconsciously.

  “No. You must have heard wrong.”

  “If it wasn’t you screaming, then who smashed that bottle?”

  Wilson looked in the direction the on-duty officer was pointing. One of the mineral water bottles lay in front of him. In pieces. It must have been thrown against the wall, crushed, and fell to the floor, which was now covered with fine shards of glass that glittered in the light of the television. He’d thrown hard.

  “I just wanted to check in. I’ll leave you alone now.” The officer looked at him, nodded, closed the door. And Wilson took deep slow breaths to try to regain his self-control.

  Now he knew. Paula. On a kill list.

  The adrenaline pumping through him now found its focus. What had expressed itself outwardly as a scream and a glass bottle thrown against a wall had inwardly turned to throbbing pain—a pressure on his chest, near the heart, a stabbing pain again and again somewhere in his gut. It wasn’t fear. Not anger. It was everything—at the same time.

  He stepped onto the glass, and it crackled. The remote control. He couldn’t find it. Had he thrown that too? He searched along the black plastic edges of the TV for the small buttons, tried them one by one, and the sound rose, then a roaring image, and then something flashed on the right edge, and then, finally, that terrible newscaster voice, so severe and intrusive, dissolved. And there was silence, and stillness, until the phone rang again.

  “Erik, I—”

  “Why the hell is he on that list?”

  “It wasn’t a kill list when we put him on it six months ago. You know that. It only just became one.”

  That was how the police worked in Sweden. That was how it worked in the United States. An informant had to have a certain level of credibility in order to infiltrate a group, present themselves as a criminal in order to be accepted. In Sweden Erik Wilson, after recruiting Piet Hoffmann, had over several years put Hoffmann on various lists as a suspect for serious crimes, the Courts Administration records retrospectively gave him a more serio
us prison record, on the Swedish prison and probation records he became characterized as violent and psychopathic—all of it gradually fueling the myth of Piet Hoffmann until he was considered one of Sweden’s most dangerous criminals. Falsifying information essential to the rule of law was part of this method.

  And that’s how the DEA had used the FBI’s Most Wanted list, subcategory “Drugs,” a list that identified the top players in the cocaine trade and was used by the Crouse Commission’s so-called War on Drugs. That very same list was now being used to hunt down the PRC, newly categorized as a terrorist organization.

  “We decided it was the simplest and quickest way. Hoffmann was able to infiltrate the PRC in eighteen months. He was just as good as you promised, maybe better. His intelligence was correct. It already stopped several deliveries and closed down a couple cocaine kitchens. None of our other informants had gotten nearly so close, gained that level of trust. But he needed to take a step beyond Sánchez, make his way further into the heart of the organization.”

  From his office in a Swedish police station, for lack of any other information, Wilson had often looked into a man called El Sueco—when he first came across the name on the FBI’s website he knew implicitly. Number seven. On the Most Wanted list of the PRC’s most dangerous individuals. Placed in the middle so as not to seem too conspicuous, but still flanked by other names that strengthened his status. When PRC’s senior management saw how highly the FBI, and therefore the United States, valued him, he was able to gain more of their confidence and thus penetrate even further into the organization—he was the enemy, defined as an asset, a self-fulfilling prophecy that made him more important.

  “I’m the only one, besides his American handler and you, Erik, who knows the truth. We couldn’t risk anyone else knowing. So officially, according to that list, he is one of our most dangerous enemies. An absurd confirmation that we’d been doing a good job. Not even my bosses have a clue.”

  “Sue, if anyone understands, it’s me. But what I don’t understand is why, why the hell, you didn’t inform anyone before this went public.”

  “Because I found out only moments before you did.”

  The informant’s alias had been snuck onto the list of the PRC’s thirteen most dangerous individuals. And it worked just as well as they’d planned. Until one of America’s most powerful public servants was attacked, taken hostage, and abducted. Until this became a kill list.

  “I chose to place him there, Erik. This is my responsibility.”

  It was her responsibility. Just like it was his responsibility when the same thing happened in Sweden.

  “I’ve already booked a meeting with the chief of staff and the vice president. In three hours. I’ll explain there’s been a mistake. That someone who’s working for us has accidentally been misidentified as the enemy. And meanwhile, Erik, you should go to the American embassy in Stockholm. I want to find out how much they know before the meeting.”

  “They?”

  “The White House. The people who just decided Piet Hoffmann should die.”

  MANY HOURS. That was what she’d said.

  Speaker of the House Timothy D. Crouse had no clue.

  Shoulders, back, hips, tailbone. He had long since gone numb, didn’t feel the pain. But he could tell that those around him were sitting on some kind of benches, that he was the only one forced to ride on the floor of the flatbed.

  Every time they braked, every move of the steering wheel meant a sharp, clumsy blow against his muscles and bones, and the roads refused to hold up, several times they got stuck in the mud, and he could feel through the flatbed that the others had jumped down to push and shove the heavy truck forward.

  He eventually floated into sleep, anxiously trying to keep a hold of his mind and consciousness, waking only when he heard, even through the earmuffs, a shrill, sharp laugh. Then he understood. One of the soldiers had stood astride him, and despite the potholes and sharp turns, kept his balance long enough to urinate all across Crouse’s chest, neck, face, and hair. Someone else kicked him in the side, toward his chest, screamed fucking wake up in stumbling English, and someone else shouted the bastard peed on himself, and a third, a woman, he’s got on a suit, but he needs a diaper. A discordant chorus of laughter in varying pitches, like the magpies near his house in Maryland when they dug into a loaf and started squawking loudly and one of them fled with the last bit of dry bread.

  He fell asleep again, disjointed fragments of a sky, green leaves, sparkling sun. They stopped one more time, away from the mud. He’d tried to move his blindfold by pressing his forehead toward his collarbone, gotten a peek, and managed to identify a PRC outpost at the edge of the road. Then it went dark. No light penetrated. The jungle had a tightly laced canopy on top of walls made of trees that stretched eighty, ninety, a hundred feet or more into the sky.

  They’d passed by a base camp, he was sure of it. When nobody was looking, he’d turned his head until his earmuffs slipped above his ears, and heard first monte, jungle, then caletas, huts. And then a peculiar sound, like the smacking of lips. He knew what it was, churuquiada, the signal the guerrillas had copied from monkeys, it was the sound they made when it was time for everyone in the camp to wake up.

  The snorting, grumbling truck stopped. Again. But for real now, the engine was turned off, the doors of the cab thrown open. It felt like a jungle—the dampness, the scent. He reckoned he was probably still in Colombia.

  Someone tore off his earmuffs, brusquely grabbed his upper arms, pulled him up from a prone position and pushed him down from the truck bed. He heard new voices, not as many as before, those who had pissed on him and cackled like magpies had been replaced by others who sounded somewhat older, hoarser, deeper. What he could hear was his reality, not the guerrilla terrorist’s unreality. The hands on his arms moved to his back and shoved him down a muddy path, he fell down and hit his forehead and one leg hard, a sharp rock met his kneecap at full force.

  And it occurred to him how much louder it was now that the truck had been turned off. The buzzing of thousands of insects created a deafening hum that entered his body, made his bones and sinews tremble. The chirping of hundreds of birds fluttering to and fro above their heads. And the monotonous cry of monkeys bouncing from clearing to clearing across the Amazon.

  More hard shoves in the back. Until somebody stopped him, pressing their hands against his chest, then cutting off his blindfold so that it crumbled to the ground.

  The muddy path had led him to the center of the camp. An armed guard stood in every corner. And huts, hovels really, were scattered around in some sort of pattern. Soldiers behind and in front of him, all dressed in camouflage and muddy rubber boots up to their knees, automatic weapons—what seemed to be AK-47s—hanging on their shoulders.

  A temporary camp. That’s what it felt like. One that could be quickly dismantled and rebuilt somewhere else.

  The man poking his ring-adorned fingers into Crouse’s chest was short and overweight. It was difficult to guess his age, anywhere from twenty-five to forty-five. As blank as all the other faces, a permanent film of sweat, but here multiple layers of old sweat were stacked under the new. The eyes dominated the face. They looked worried. But weren’t. Someone trying to appear worried because he’d learned people responded positively to it.

  “Señor Crouse. Or is it perhaps . . . Speaker Diaper? Welcome, my friend. My name is Maximiliano Cubero. Commander of the PRC’s special front. But you can call me Commandant like all the other prisoners.”

  The voice was like the eyes. It sounded calm, friendly. As if he was trying to sound like that, had learned people liked calm, friendly voices.

  Then he raised it, became more intense as he turned to the man right behind him, giving orders. To someone who, according to his insignia, who was second in command. And who, in turn, tried to sound like the commandant when he turned to the two men behind him, standing at strict attention. They both listened and then started walking toward a small wooden bu
ilding with a tin roof, which, unlike the others, was closed on all sides with a narrow door of bamboo bars. The commandant prodded Crouse hard in his side with an elbow and pointed to it.

  “The House of Representatives. We’ll be calling the caleta that from now on. What do you say to that, Mr. Speaker?”

  A cage. That’s what it was. Nothing else. Crouse glimpsed a straw mattress on the floor, and next to it a plastic bowl. And there, he hadn’t noticed at first, in a back corner of the cage sat a human being. A severely malnourished man with an unkempt beard and hair, the remains of a shirt in rags, a pair of dress pants cut off at the knees, held up with a thin rope around a sunken waist. The two guerrillas opened the lock and the jail door creaked, they stepped inside and pulled the man up with a hand under each armpit, dragged him out behind them.

  “Have you met?” The commandant’s eyes looked worried, his voice friendly. “If not, this is Señor Crouse from the United States. And this is Señor Clarke. Also from the United States! Isn’t it lovely that the two of you could meet like this? I mean, since you’re both traveling abroad?”

  Clarke. A name Crouse recognized. One of the most prominent of the 254 Americans currently being held hostage by the PRC. They had in fact met at a celebration and subsequent press conference in DC. Four years ago. Maybe five. And he’d been here basically ever since, moving from one jungle encampment to another. When Crouse got closer to his face, he could make out vague traces of the man that used to exist.

  “Good. Now that you’ve had the chance to get to know each other, it’s time to say good-bye.”

  It was strange. Crouse had thought about it since the truck bed. He should be afraid. But he wasn’t. Not yet. Furious! That’s what he was.