Three Minutes

by Anders Roslund

  Wilson handed over one of the cups, and thin steam rose from it in the desk lamplight. Two men who never wore uniforms sat across from each other, wearing just that. And both realized how little it takes to see, and be perceived, differently. Two people who knew each other, but not really.

  “Okay. What did you want?”

  “Can I borrow your computer?”

  Grens shoved his computer across the desk and turned the screen toward the visitor’s chair, while Wilson fished his wallet out of the inside pocket of his jacket. With thumb and forefinger against the coin pocket, he edged out the flash drive he’d received from Jennings, pushed it gently into the computer, and clicked on the file called Seven of Hearts.

  “Come here, please.” He waited until Grens was standing beside him. “I want you to look at this.”

  Wilson moved the cursor toward the timeline, clicked again, making sure that it was the right sequence. The perspective from above. Slightly blurry images. But it was clear that we were in a jungle. That we were following a truck transport that was often obscured by the thick foliage of the trees. The truck approached a broad river, parked right next to the beach, and two people jumped out. They started unloading, stacking boxes onto a waiting barge. Until the flatbed was empty, and the two climbed on board.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “Just watch.”

  “I’ve already lost too much of my work day to a jail cell. So if you’ll excuse me—I have a lot to do and absolutely none of it concerns your nature film.”

  “Keep watching.”

  The timeline again. The two men in the jungle were now riding the barge down a winding river. And Grens stared at the screen as he’d been asked—it had been easier to reach him than usual. Grens was listening in a different way. No arrogance, distance. It could be from the shame of having been locked up. But probably not. More likely it was the uniforms, Erik Wilson was almost sure of it. Not because there were more lines on Wilson’s shoulders, Grens had never paid attention to such things. It was more that their personal differences had been erased—the personal was just no longer in the way. Maybe he should wear a uniform more often, at least in this office.

  Now. A rapid zooming in toward one of the men on the barge. A vague outline of a body in gray squares. As close as they could get.

  And Wilson searched Grens’s face, which was gradually becoming more interested, focused. He’d had the same expression back then.

  Three years ago—the hostage drama that a trapped Piet Hoffmann, facing death, had staged at Aspsås prison. Back then Grens had watched another monitor, and after much anguish, ordered the marksman to fire at the hostage taker. It was the first death Ewert Grens had commanded.

  “That last bit? I want to see it one more time.”

  Wilson moved the cursor along the timeline, the sequence started again at the same point—zooming in on the barge. On the man moving on it.

  Grens leaned closer. Toward someone who seemed . . . familiar. He could almost make out a tattoo on the shaved head. Shaped like a large, meandering snake, or maybe some kind of lizard. There’d been no tattoo on the head back then, Grens was sure that was new. And of course the clothing was very different. And he was leaner. And yet. The way he moved. The one thing you couldn’t change.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “You recognize him?”

  Grens hurried over to his bookcase, ran his forefinger along the backs of binders, pulled out one of them. At the very back was a plastic pocket and in it a CD.

  “I studied him, Wilson. His movements. Hour after hour, day after day. That’s the way movements are, they’re etched in, and without you knowing it they take up their own damn space in your consciousness. I’d know this man anywhere.”

  Wilson watched as Ewert’s face turned a deep red. The man who’d given the order for a fatal shot—and who only later realized that he’d made that call based on an incorrect premise. Unaware that Piet Hoffmann was in the service of the police. And that he, Ewert Grens, had been reduced to a useful idiot so others could get away with legally protected murder. And that’s why he’d stormed into Wilson’s office, screaming about hidden agendas, about truth and lies, in this very same corridor.

  And now—he’d probably shout again. Because Piet Hoffmann was alive. Because Erik Wilson had known and hadn’t informed him. Let Grens believe he was responsible for the death of an innocent man. But instead he seemed strangely calm, and his voice lacked that icy phrasing he was so good at.

  “Paula. Piet Hoffmann. I knew he was alive. Just like you. The whole time.” Grens coaxed the CD from its plastic pocket and wiped it with a quiet whistle, then came a barely audible humming as he cleaned away the messy fingerprints crowded on the reflective surface, finally he poked it into the side of the computer.

  Wilson never looked away from his face. It had changed from unwilling to focused.

  I knew he was alive. The whole time.

  And now it was unreadable.

  “This is a copy of the surveillance tape recorded by the central guard station camera at Aspsås prison. The week after Piet Hoffmann had, well, died there. Let me show you the fourth day.” Grens had stopped whistling and humming, and his whole face tightened, lips as well as cheeks, as he pulled the cursor along the timeline for four days, four nights. And stopped at 20:06. “Do you know how many murders I have investigated, Wilson?”

  They both saw it on the screen. A man with very short hair in a guard uniform was approaching. He stared up at the camera for a little too long as he walked out. Making sure that when these images were examined later you’d have time to see who it was.

  “I’ve investigated two hundred and twenty-seven murders. Out of those, five are unsolved. And seven are solved but the perp remains free. But that man you saw there, Wilson—that’s the murderer I wake up every morning glad to know I never caught.”

  Grens let the sequence continue, and the camera now followed the disguised man through the gate in the wall, toward a beautiful evening and freedom. “When I found this, realized he’d deceived me, us—well, I chose to keep it to myself.”

  Two men in uniform. On the same side of a desk. They regarded each other in silence.

  Wilson had thought that only three people knew. But for three long years, there had been a fourth.

  “Thank you.” He searched Grens’s gaze. Waiting. Until he got a nod, discreet but still there. Which meant you did your job, I did mine, and that’s how it works sometimes. “Then I want us to do the same thing again, Ewert.”

  “Do what?”

  “Make sure he survives.”

  IT WAS NOT a good photograph. Badly lit, not quite in focus. Despite that, it was still the most heinous image Chief of Staff Perry had ever encountered. Bars. A cage. And a man behind those bars, inside that cage. Timothy D. Crouse. Speaker of the House of Representatives—and part of the same power structure that everyone in this room belonged to. But the picture stripped that away, completely. He might as well have been naked.

  “The IP address was traced to an Internet café in Bogotá. It’s at the bottom there, an investigator at the NGA has written it out by hand, just below the photo’s timestamp.”

  They all moved in closer, scrutinizing that same image. Or maybe not quite the same. They were struck by different details, as viewers are. One noticed how dark it was, late at night, and wondered if the photographer had deliberately kept him awake in order to increase the menace of the setting. Someone else was struck by the clay that surrounded the cage, brown mud covered with shoe prints. Yet another noted that Crouse was wearing extremely dirty clothes, maybe even the same suit he’d had on a couple of days earlier in the corridor outside this very room.

  Thoughts like shadows. But that’s how it worked. Focusing on the minor to protect yourself from the unthinkable. Like now, reflecting on how a suit and a jungle didn’t really seem to go together.

  And last, probably because it was noted at the top of the document, i
n the same sprawling handwriting as before, they saw how the NGA investigator had written that the picture had been addressed to the president and sent to the White House’s public email address.

  “What’s that? Is it . . . ?” Chief of Staff Perry pointed to the cage floor. There was a thin straw mattress rolled out behind Crouse, but that was not his aim, he was pointing to the round bit of plastic that stood next to it. It looked like a bowl. “And it’s half full. Some stew. Potatoes? And something else?”

  A cage. A plastic bowl on the floor. To deprive a person of his dignity, treat him like an animal.

  On the left near the edge, placed in that same brown sludge, a part of another cage was visible, and someone was sitting inside it, on the floor with her back against him, probably a woman. On the right edge, almost as if it had been arranged, they could just make out a weapon balanced on four metal feet in the mud.

  “A Russian bazooka.” The CIA director leaned closer, changed his glasses. “An RPG-29 Vampire. You could take down a tank with it. Hezbollah took out several Israeli tanks with it during the Lebanon war. A demonstration of power, in its simplest form.”

  “A cage. A rocket launcher. But no demands.” Chief Perry focused on the man they all knew. He must have been instructed to stand in the foreground, holding on tightly to the bamboo bars of his cage. “I don’t get it. Do any of you? Sending us this picture, but not a single demand?”

  Crouse’s fingers looked like they were cramping as they seized onto those sticks, holding him upright. A bottomless, blank stare. And the camera’s harsh flash struck his face and turned his otherwise deeply tanned skin almost completely white.

  Perry sat down on the sofa he’d just left, put the photo in the middle of the coffee table, pushed it away a bit, as if trying to avoid those fearful, pleading eyes. Vice President Thompson sat down next to him, pulled the photo closer, and studied it quietly for a long time.

  “We’ve put out a kill list of the thirteen names who are ultimately responsible for this, the leaders of a terrorist organization.” She held it close as if she were speaking directly to it, to her colleague who stood there and wanted to go home. “Everyone on that list will be eliminated, one name at a time. And no half-criminal European is going to jeopardize that.”

  She nodded toward the picture, toward Crouse.

  “Crossed off, one name at a time.”

  EWERT GRENS HAD stood up, started pacing the room nervously. Soon he put a cassette into the tape deck like he always did when he was seeking equilibrium, “Tunna Skivor.” Siw singing the same version, every time. He sat down, compared the surveillance video of a man walking out of a prison with the satellite recording of man stepping onto a barge in a jungle. Silent. Until now.

  “So this is how he earns his living.” Grens was often ironic, even cynical and malicious. This comment could have been interpreted in that way. But his face, his eyes, said something else, Erik Wilson was sure of it.

  “Yes. That’s how he supported himself. Until a half hour ago. When his employers chose to terminate his service.”

  Now it was Wilson’s turn to approach the bookcase, the shelf above the ancient tape deck. He pulled out one of the books there—voluminous, heavy. A world atlas. He leafed through it, started from the back as he so often did, and noted the cardboard pocket and library card, the kind that existed before. He pulled it out, turned it, read.

  Stockholm Public Library.

  DUE: October 18, 1989.

  And he smiled, glancing at the detective, who smiled back.

  “Statute of limitations, Wilson. Right?”

  Without answering, Wilson moved Grens’s coffee cup, telephone, desk lamp, and his pile of ongoing investigations, making room for the bulky book, and continued flipping until he found what he was looking for on page 218. A large map of South America. He grabbed a red marker from the desk organizer and marked a couple of boundaries. A square, or rhombus rather, at the top left corner, the Caribbean on one side and the Pacific on the other.

  “Ewert, what do you know about Colombia?”

  “Best coffee in the world. Meant to be drunk black. None of that milky bullshit.”

  Wilson smiled, like before, the room had been missing that irony and cynicism for a moment. “Okay. Do you know anything else?”

  “Beautiful, warm climate. But extremely corrupt. Violent. Powerful drug cartels. One of the few places I’ve decided never to visit—even though ninety-nine percent of the population is nice as can be.”

  Wilson turned the map toward Grens, ran his finger along the red line. “And yet that’s where you’re headed.”

  Grens didn’t even look at the open page, spoke softly, almost whispering. “Almost everything we investigate in this fucking building—do you realize that, Wilson? Almost all of our investigations are related to drugs? To the products produced right there, in Colombia.”

  “Gaira Café, Ewert.”

  “One hundred thousand drug offenses a year in just our small country. Doubles every ten years. And I’m only talking about drug crimes. Not about the robbery, theft, burglary that happens in order to get money to buy the shit. Nor the violence that comes from defending drug turfs or recovering debts. Drugs, Wilson, are driving crime. They’re behind everything we do. The cost, the total cost of Swedish drug use approaches thirty billion kronor a year—health care, social services, illness, premature death. That sort of thing. In addition, you’ve got all your smashed-up shop windows and broken doors and police and legal costs and all other health-care interventions caused by shootings or serious assault or . . . Wilson, drugs don’t just drive all crime, they drive our entire society! When you think about it, do people even want it to end? When so many make their living from the consequences?”

  “Gaira Café in Bogotá.” Wilson flipped forward in the never-returned world atlas, found a city map, pointed until Grens gave in and looked down. “Calle 96, between Carrera 13 and 13A.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You’ll meet the man sauntering through your surveillance video there. The same man who’s switching from a truck to a barge in mine. You’ll get the exact time when your plane lands at El Dorado International.”

  Grens didn’t respond. But didn’t protest either. He seemed to sink into the map, lines and squares representing another reality.

  “I can’t go myself. I wish I could—but it’s impossible. If I were caught, the investigation would connect me with the person in the US who hired Hoffmann. And she’d lose both her job and her future.”

  The older detective stood up for a second time, turned up the volume on “Tweedle Dee,” an annoyingly happy and catchy jingle that sounded more ’50s than ’60s.

  “Listen to me, Ewert. You are probably—and I might as well be completely honest now—the person in this building least suited to this particular mission. And that’s unfortunate. But—you can’t be traced to her. And you know him. And that’s what this is all about—you’re the only one, besides me, he’d trust. You were the one he entrusted a brown envelope of evidence to just a few hours after his prison escape.” Wilson looked at his colleague, who seemed to be listening as much to the music as to his boss. “Your task, Ewert, is to seek out and assist Hoffmann. Adapt to the situation and possibilities. You’ll get the entire background after you’ve packed up and retrieved your passport.”

  A few final notes and the chorus had finally subsided.

  “I want to see him here, Ewert, alive.”

  “Sorry. I don’t have a passport. Never done much traveling.”

  “We can take care of that.”

  Silence. The tape had ended. And Grens didn’t put on another one.

  “I take it this is an order, Wilson?”

  “No. This is not an order. You’ll have no authority there. And no protection.”

  The burly police officer, who felt so safe in this office, with its shabby corduroy sofa and music from another time, now looked at his boss and shrugged. “You make it sound so temp
ting.”

  “And absolutely no one, regardless of the circumstances, can confirm your assignment.”

  “Just like any criminal informant.” Grens smiled again.

  “You have to leave now. Immediately. This is urgent. When Americans do these kinds of things, when they reach out for broad support and turn things into a question of international politics, history shows they strike fast. I’m convinced they already have their first target ready to go.”

  A VIDEO GAME. He would never get used to the fact that it looked like that. Or felt like that. At any moment, it seemed like his mother’s voice might call out from downstairs, food. His mother never gave up until he stopped, pressed pause, hurried down the stairs, and silently ate something fried and cleared his dish, then rushed up again to his room and desk and a game in a different world.

  Steve Sabrinsky held the joystick lightly while searching across the computer’s two screens. It still felt like a video game. And that’s how he tried to think of it, like the games played in the crowded room of his boyhood home, as if firing missiles at a human were something he was racking up points for, and that when this was over, he would be able to press restart. The whole world reset again, and nothing would have happened.

  But it didn’t work like that. This game was serious. The dead would remain dead.

  He drank half a cup of green tea and half a Coca-Cola in a room some ship designer had crammed in below deck by one of the staircases. Just a few square meters left over on the drawing, which an architect discovered just before they started building and scribbled down in this tiny room someone will sit at a desk taking people’s lives from them. And that’s exactly what he did. It was cramped, but there was enough space for the desk, the two computer screens, and a chair.

  “Sabrinsky?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Our target has been localized. It’s under surveillance.”