And—room for the combat commander on this aircraft carrier, who was standing just behind him, and who now leaned in closer as he handed over a piece of paper.
“Current GPS coordinates.” Garlic. And coffee. That’s what the commander’s warm breath on his neck smelled like. “Activate the UCAV.”
Steve Sabrinsky entered the real-world coordinates—beyond this video-game screen—which stood for a real house with a real family, then pressed the download button and waited for a light to illuminate, confirm.
USS Liberty. A real aircraft carrier: 365 meters long, 102,000 tons, 4,700 crew members. Separate takeoff and landing runways. A real combat commander behind him.
This was where he’d been headed for so long. This was what he’d been educated and trained for—getting his marching orders at midnight, leaving the 32nd Street Naval Station in San Diego and sailing the Pacific Ocean down the West Coast, past Mexico and Guatemala and El Salvador and Nicaragua and Costa Rica and Panama. All of it to reach this point. Eight nautical miles off the shores of Colombia. To trade the strident electronic air below deck for the caress of fresh sea air and to clearly see the outlines of Buenaventura.
He made sure the UCAV had a full tank, that the coordinates were entered correctly into the system, then started the engine and turned on the camera. And turned toward the commander, who nodded.
Steve Sabrinsky pressed one of the side buttons on the joystick. And the two-hundred-pound drone started rolling from one side of the ship’s deck to the other. Until the numbers at the bottom of the screen confirmed it was going more than eighty-five kph. And at that moment, at the ship’s edge, he pulled back the joystick and released the drone, let it take off, fly.
It was beautiful as it moved across the screen. On its way. Because he told it to.
Sabrinsky realized he had been holding his breath, and released it now, took another, deep breath.
It started to dip! More gas. More gas! Then climb again.
“Good. Leave it there. Five, maximum six meters above the water.”
Almost no wind. No waves. This was going to work.
“Until it reaches Buenaventura. Then let it climb.”
The target coordinates were in the top right of the screen. They matched. The drone was headed in the right direction. Height. Speed. Those figures were also consistent. And in the box below stood information on the armament—a rocket grenade with thermobaric charge. The kind they used on unprotected targets. When they were detonated, they generated a powerful wave that killed whoever the explosion might have missed.
“Distance to target?”
“Eight kilometers, sir.”
“In here we don’t use sirs. Understood?”
“Understood, si—understood.”
“At the coast, climb to one hundred meters. Keep it away from buildings. The direction is Cali, according to the target coordinates. After contact with the target, climb another fifty meters. Then lock on target.”
This was no longer a video game. This was his very first time. From game to real.
“Our objective has been confirmed to be inside the target. Now, Sabrinsky, lock on target.”
“Locked on target. One hundred and fifteen seconds to detonation.”
“Drift? Elevation?”
“Drift zero. Elevation one hundred and fifty meters and sinking.”
From life to death.
“Unlock the charge.”
“Charge unlocked. Fifty-seven seconds to detonation.”
The large screen had a bull’s-eye in the middle, or what looked like one anyway, rings nestled inside each other. In the innermost ring stood a house. As the drone came closer, and thus the camera, it became clear that someone was moving outside the house, probably three bodies, two small and one bigger.
Steve Sabrinsky rested his finger lightly on a button that would abort. The order could come at any moment.
“Ten seconds until detonation.”
EWERT GRENS LIMPED a little more than usual with a bulky suitcase in his hand. Brown with an uneven, lumpy surface, the material was difficult to determine, maybe plastic, maybe leather on pasteboard. It had been in his storage space in the attic just like he remembered, as dusty as everything else up there. Not very elegant, not used much. They’d bought it together, back then. Or, Anni had bought one for each of them. And there was a stamp of the Eiffel Tower in one corner, which she’d pasted there on their first day in their hotel room. It had sat in storage since then.
“Ewert?” Sven Sundkvist sat behind his desk. His door stood open to the homicide unit corridor. Headphones on his close-cropped, blond head, and leaning forward slightly on his elbows. He usually sat just like that listening to and analyzing recordings of interrogations from before he became lead interrogator. Always so thorough. “You seem stressed.”
“Yes.” Grens continued walking, though usually he would have stopped, leaned against the doorframe, continued the conversation they’d been having for so many years, Grens didn’t talk to many. Sven Sundkvist hurried over to the door and saw that Grens was trying to disappear down the corridor.
“Ewert, what are you up to?”
“I can’t discuss it.”
“A suitcase? Are you taking a—”
“Sorry, Sven, but this doesn’t concern you.”
The next door to open was Mariana Hermansson’s. And she called after him.
“I heard you were inspecting the facilities at the Kronoberg jail! For several hours!”
Now he stopped, peeked inside. She was sitting just like Sven, at her desk, but not listening, watching a TV instead, a recording from a police lineup—men with numbers on their chests, being recorded by a camera on the other side of a one-way mirror. She had certainly seen it before and was watching again to make sure it was going to hold up in court. Sven there, Mariana here, both equally painstaking in their work. Grens was proud of them, in his own way.
“You surely couldn’t have heard that. That kind of information is confidential. Surely the Swedish police wouldn’t violate confidentiality or gossip about their colleagues. Right, Hermansson?”
“Seems like the detective violated it quite well himself when he was loudly proclaiming his colleagues incompetent.”
“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. You can ask anyone in this corridor if I’m ever loud.”
He smiled. She smiled. He got ready to go. She nodded to the suitcase.
“Going somewhere?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“That’s not something I can discuss with you. But on my desk you’ll find all my open cases where an arrest is imminent. I want you and Sven to take care of them while I’m gone.”
“For how long, Ewert?” Like Sven, she was now calling after him. “Ewert!”
“I don’t know yet. A week. Maybe two.”
He didn’t look back, just stepped into the elevator and stepped out again when he’d reached the ground floor exit toward Kungsholm Street. Erik Wilson was waiting for him there. He had his private car idling, ready to go. Grens threw the suitcase in the backseat, and they started driving through the rush hour traffic of a capital city. They took the bus lane. And took the dividing pavement when there was none. Once they left the inner city, he sped up.
“There.” Grens pointed out through the passenger-side window. “That’s where I was headed today.”
The North Cemetery lay on the other side of the fence. And a person who had long meant everything to him.
“And I’m still on my way there.” Two smashed bottles. He’d try again when he got home. “And the chief prosecutor is still a magnificent ass.”
After that they sat in silence. Passed Helenelund, passed Sollentuna. As they approached Upplands Väsby, Wilson reached over Grens and opened the glove compartment.
“There at the back, Ewert, there’s a plastic bag. Two telephones for emergencies only. One for communicating with Hoffmann. One for communicating with me. Each phone i
s for calls from a single number. Or calls to a single number.” Two burner phones that only called each other. And if anyone were to get ahold of their phones, there would be no names, just an untraceable, unknown subscriber who made and received calls from an untraceable, unknown subscriber.
“Next to that is your emergency passport. Valid for two months. And it allows you entry to the United States, just to be sure.” Grens pulled out something pink. Emergency Passport. Thinner than the regular kind. He opened it and saw a picture of himself, taken from his personnel file.
“And under that, in that plastic pocket, is everything else you need.” Grens took that out too. First his flight information. Departure at 19:25. Layover and an overnight stay in London. Total flight time of twenty-six hours and twenty minutes. “You land in Bogotá tomorrow at sixteen ten. Local time.”
Next document. A hotel reservation. “Estelar La Fontana. Room 555. Top floor. Extremely quiet. That’s where I usually stay.”
Then a map. Grens unfolded it. A city map of Bogotá, larger than the one in the world atlas and more detailed. Three large letters in red ink. An A—airport. An H—hotel. And a P between them.
“Paula. I still call him that. That’s where you’ll meet. Gaira Café, at fifteen hundred. I’ll let you know the day.”
Grens held the passport, the reservations, the map of the meeting place. “How long were you a handler?”
“Twelve years.”
“I can tell. You’ve still got it.”
Neither irony nor annoyance. Seriousness. That’s what Wilson heard in Ewert’s voice. It was the first time, he was sure of it, that he’d ever heard sincere praise coming from Ewert Grens. And it felt good.
“Yes. But then again, I usually recruit my colleagues from prison.”
They smiled, as they’d managed to do earlier today.
“Those final documents.” Wilson nodded at the glove box and Grens rooted around inside it, found five tightly packed A4 sheets in a separate plastic pouch. “I continued the logbook. Once I realized he was alive. You’re holding a copy of it.”
“And this time it’s . . . everything?”
Lies and truth in the same police corridor. Crimes hidden away in order to solve other crimes. Secret intelligence reports, which told what really happened—and falsified records that caused a detective superintendent to make the wrong call. That’s what had happened. And that’s why everything went to hell.
“Yes.” Erik Wilson slowed slightly, a truck was passing another truck, forcing the rest of the fast lane to slow down. Lost seconds in the race for a flight whose departure time was creeping ever closer. “Grens—I promise, no secrets.”
He’d never worked that way before. A handler’s first commandment—no information related to an informant can fall into unknown hands. But now he was doing the exact opposite. Inside that plastic pocket stood the name of the informant, the handler, the informant’s other contact; there were descriptions of strategy, meeting places, family situation, housing, appearance, distinctive marks—and a five-sided summary of two years spent infiltrating a guerrilla organization that had just been reclassified as a terrorist organization. During his time as an active handler, information like this had always been written down by hand and kept in a black binder. The code name followed by the date followed by a summary of that particular day’s brief encounter in an apartment emptied for renovation in a property that could be accessed from two different addresses. Page by page, meeting by meeting. And attached to each logbook was an envelope that contained the informant’s real name, sealed by the handler on the first day of the mission with a shiny red wax seal. A binder and an envelope that were kept in a safe by a responsible CHIS controller, behind a six-figure code and a heavy door.
This was contrary to all of his training and experience. But there were no other options. This was the only chance Piet Hoffmann had to survive.
“Read this on the plane to London. When you land at Heathrow, before going through security, go to the bathroom. Rip every piece of paper into the smallest possible pieces. And flush them down more than one toilet.”
The exit for the airport. He turned right, drove the last bit at a significantly higher speed than was allowed.
“Pay everything with your own cash. I’ll make sure you’re compensated from the account for anonymous tips.”
Grens dug into his inside jacket pocket—police badge, police identification, work phone. He put everything in the now empty glove compartment.
“You travel there as a tourist, and you step off the plane as a tourist. I’ll repeat what I said earlier. No jurisdiction. No protection. No one here—regardless of the time or situation—can confirm your assignment.”
Terminal 5. They had arrived. Grens got out, brown suitcase in hand. Wilson rolled down his window and held out another envelope.
“Five tickets. Home from Bogotá. All open.”
The detective superintendent looked at his boss, then the envelope. He opened it. His own name appeared on the first. Peter Haraldsson on the next. Then Maria, Sebastian, and William Haraldsson.
“So that’s what they’re going by these days?”
Grens was more impressed than he’d like to admit. Wilson really had thought of everything—not a single hole or loose stitch in the fabric woven to protect the informant who was his responsibility. But he didn’t have much imagination.
PH. Piet Hoffmann. Peter Haraldsson.
“He’s coming back here, Ewert. Piet, Zofia, Hugo, Rasmus, they’re all coming back to Sweden. Alive.”
THE SCREEN HAD been turned off. But Steve Sabrinsky still sat in the tiny room. He should be happy, bubbling inside, laughing on the outside. This had been his goal for so long. This was for real. But it didn’t feel like that at all. It felt empty. Maybe because it was for real. There was no restart. This day would never be coming back, just like that. He’d left video games behind and entered a world where living, breathing people walked around until they didn’t anymore, because he’d blown them up.
There had been ten seconds left to detonation. He’d waited for a voice behind him to shout abort. But no one did. Ten seconds became five seconds, three seconds, one second, the display graphics had been so precise, so detailed as the drone released its armament and the target exploded.
“Sabrinsky.”
Combat commander. He’d gone away for a while to the intelligence center, after impact.
“Yes, sir?”
“Sir? What did I say about that? That that’s no good inside this room.”
“I remember.”
“Good. Because there’s no sir in here.” The commander put his hand on Sabrinsky’s shoulder. It was heavy, warm, and squeezed hard as he spoke. “I want you to take a look at this.”
He had three photographs in his other hand. He spread them across the narrow desk, between the keyboard and joystick. “A few minutes old. Taken by our scouts.”
The first image. Black-and-white and angled from above. A house. Or what was a house until very recently. Now all that remained was a concrete foundation and burning, scattered rubble above it.
“You did it.”
The next image had been zoomed out. And there were people lying on the ground, not far from the flames. Motionless.
“You took out the terrorists.”
Sabrinsky ran his finger across the smooth surface of the paper. There was something that looked like . . . a small playground. Two swings that had spun and spun, lap after lap around a steel structure, until they got stuck at the top.
First an explosion. Then a wave blast.
In the third picture, he was brought in closer again. And it was easier to make sense and identify. He was sure now—the people on the ground were a woman and two children. But nowhere, no matter how closely he looked, could he find their target. Until he realized why. Their target had been inside a house, which didn’t exist anymore.
ERIK WILSON WAS at a complete standstill near the exit to Arlanda, on his way
back to Stockholm, waiting to get onto the E4 highway. Vehicle after vehicle as far as he could see. A traffic jam, here? Cars lined up for at least another kilometer, probably hundreds of them. And from his gut, through his chest, and into his neck—stress. Even though he didn’t need it anymore. They’d made it. Grens was on his way to the departure gate—there was nothing more he could do right now. The adrenaline that had started pumping through him after he saw the news, racing through him when he was stuck in another traffic jam on his way to the US embassy, seemed impossible to turn off now. Maybe he didn’t want to let go of the rush. So familiar, integral to who he was. The opposite of meetings and negotiations. And it wouldn’t be going anywhere just yet. He knew that for sure. Not this evening, not tonight. His heart skipping a beat, sweating, those damn dreams where he was being chased. He used to, back when this was his life, take care of it with alcohol. But he wouldn’t do that tonight. He no longer cared for the effects. It made him stubborn, almost aggressive, the adrenaline temporarily pushed aside only to show up the next morning with even greater force accompanied by apprehension, uneasiness, anxiety—and he had no desire to meet that gang again.
“Yes, this is the on-duty officer.”
He’d entered the preprogrammed number, now put the phone’s microphone to his mouth.
“Erik Wilson, from the homicide unit. I’m stuck in a traffic jam on my way to the city from Arlanda. Can you find out why?”
“One moment.” Buzzing silence. A series of clicks. Eyes searching a computer screen. “A truck. Near Bredden. It’s lying on its side after a collision. Obstructing all lanes.”
“How long until they clear it?”
More noise. More buttons. “I’ll look into it and get back to you.”
Wilson sighed and waited, phone in hand. If he’d been in a patrol car, he could have put on the blue lights and passed by on the shoulder.
The tea he bought on his way out of the city was long since cold. Even the cardboard cup seemed chilly. He loosened it from the cup holder and drank what was left. It didn’t help. He felt equally hunted, drums inside him rumbled out of step.
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