He remembered exactly when he’d made the decision. How he’d rambled through the morning, the day, the evening from communida to communida in Cali with Peter at his side, showing that the new guy from Sweden should be accepted, invited, was one of them from now on. He’d vouched for him and absolutely no one had misunderstood—the man I’m introducing to you now, you don’t touch him.
Clínica Medellín’s entrance hall was as bright and calm as he’d come to expect, and he stopped there at the small flower shop, pointed to a colorful bouquet, and tore away the paper as he rode the elevator to the eighteenth floor.
That fucking smell again. Disease. Death. Her death.
He counted even more beds than on his last visit. Now they stood in rows, and in two lines in the corridor.
But in the room at the end of corridor she was alone. Eyes closed, as usual. Yet somehow different. She was unconscious. And it gave her face a sort of peace. Her wrinkles weren’t quite as sharp, her mouth not so ready to bite. He kissed her forehead, opened the window for some fresh air, moved the visitor’s chair from the foot of the bed closer to her hands.
“Are you back already?” The female doctor, who he paid double to take care of a single patient, winced as she stepped in and realized that someone was inside the hospital room.
“She’s worse. She needs her medicine.”
“You left us enough anti-virals to last the next couple of weeks, as I told you on the phone. There are other reasons that she’s doing worse.”
“Other reasons?”
“Complications. No one dies of AIDS. It’s the complications that get you. A yeast infection, a bad cold. Your mother is fighting pneumonia right now.”
He looked at his mother. She was breathing with a peace she’d never had before, and it was contagious, he realized he too was breathing peacefully. And then he handed the cooler to the doctor, medicine for next month.
“I’d like to be alone with her for a little longer.”
It was his money, his mother, so the doctor nodded and left.
He sought out her thin hand, stared into an emaciated face that changed slowly. If she smiled. If she pursed her lips and got angry. It didn’t matter, she’d know he was there. He caressed the back of her hand, her cheek—and almost missed how that bird-thin woman used to transform into someone who screamed and hounded and demanded.
Her left arm was connected by tubes to a plastic bag of liquids, those reluctant drops pressed down, let go, and fell into her. Despite that, she seemed to be in pain. He felt it. And leaned against the stand, pressed the button to the infusion pump, several times, increasing her morphine. The drops now let go faster and were replaced more quickly by new ones.
The woman who taught him about trust was not going to end her life in pain. The woman who took trust from him, who taught him to never, ever, ever trust anyone.
You were right, Mother. If I open myself, let down my guard, I lose control. Or someone takes it away from me. Flies home to Europe with it.
He’d kissed her forehead again and left the room, the ward, the hospital. For the last time. Sometimes you just know, know it will soon be over.
A twenty-minute drive from Clínica Medellín to the other side of town, to the square that led into the dark, cramped aisles of La Galería. A throng, as always. People and voices mingling with the piles of fruit, fish, meat. All the way to the very last stalls of fish and melted ice at the edge of the market. There the boys sat on wooden benches, waiting and hoping. And when he arrived there he realized even the colors had come back. Everything could be seen and heard and tasted. A long journey from transparency.
El Mestizo stepped out onto the small forgotten square. And everything happened as it always did. Everyone stood up at the same time, rushed to him, stretched up for his attention.
That is, everyone except the boy he’d come to give this mission to. Camilo, who he’d hired so many times over the last few years, who El Mestizo had been employing since his very first mission. Now he sat there on the bench looking almost disinterested. El Mestizo stopped abruptly, waving away those who approached, and beckoning to the boy who loitered.
“Camilo?”
The lanky twelve-year-old waved back.
“Come here.”
And he slowly cut his way through his disappointed peers.
“I have a job for you.”
That smile. Which always followed an offer. It didn’t come. And the boy looked down at the ground, when previously he always made eye contact.
El Mestizo didn’t understand. The boy in front of him was usually so proud to call himself a sicario. He’d kill just to be able to kill. Now he stood here, in a place where such deals are made looking . . . sad.
“I’m not taking any jobs, señor. Not for a while.”
“Two hundred dollars.”
“I can’t. I gave someone my word.”
“So what are you doing here?”
“I want to be here. Always.” Still no eye contact.
“So El Mestizo’s best sicario is no longer the best? Maybe I need to pay you more.”
“Afterward, señor, I’ll work again.”
“Four hundred dollars.”
“Four hundred?”
“Yes. Because this is a very special and important mission. That’s just for the first one. And you’ll get four hundred more for each member of the family. His wife and two children, younger than you are. A total of one thousand six hundred US dollars for a single mission.”
“One . . . thousand six hundred dollars . . . ?”
“Eight hundred now. Eight hundred when you come back.”
El Mestizo held out two fists, unfurled them one at a time, revealed what lay in his left hand, then the right, and the boy stared at two genuine five-hundred-dollar bills and six genuine hundred-dollar bills.
Eight hundred for Mom. Eight hundred for his metal box. It wasn’t often Camilo missed the what, how, and why. Now he felt . . . a bubbling in his chest, that was how it felt.
“Who?”
“My friend. Or he was my friend. Before he betrayed me.”
“El Sueco?”
“El Sueco. And his wife. And his children. In that order.”
Then the bubbling rose up to his head. Spun him around and around. Now during the time when he’d been paid to kill no one, he was being offered even more money to kill the one who’d paid him not to kill.
“That guy? Who usually comes here with you? Who protects you?”
“Not anymore.”
A cautious nod. And finally he made eye contact. “Okay.”
First, he wanted the money lying in the palm of one hand, it was important. Then he grabbed the ticket to a bus that left for Cali in two hours. Then the address. Then the gun, which came with eight cartridges, two for each person.
“The house you’re going to will be dark and empty. It’s been like that for the past few days. But all the furniture, all their belongings are still there. So they will have to go by there soon, because they’re headed on a trip, and they’ll need to retrieve their things. That’s why we’re in a bit of a hurry. So we can make sure you’re there in time. To take care of them, one at a time.”
The sadness remained, the sadness El Mestizo didn’t understand, but the boy disappeared quickly with the gun, wrapped in a piece of cloth, along with the money—he was after all a sicario, a professional. El Mestizo waited until he was out of sight before turning back to the rest of the hopeful child hitmen. But now, he wanted the opposite—it wasn’t experience he sought, it was a beginner. And he did as he usually did when he gave someone a mission for the very first time, waited to ask questions until they surrounded him.
“You’ve all done this before?”
They answered like they always did, all at the same time. “Sí!”
All of them except a boy who stood in the back. Who didn’t raise his hand, or shout five times or twelve times or twenty-two times.
“What about you?”
&n
bsp; “Never. Or . . . not yet.”
“Well then, it’s time. For your first. Today.” El Mestizo peeled two hundred-dollar bills from a wad, then pulled a gun out of a sack-like bag along with a silencer and two cartridges. And a small photo.
“This. This is your mission.”
The boy—El Mestizo guessed ten, maybe eleven years old—stared at the picture. “Him?”
“Him.”
“But that’s . . . I know him.”
“Sometimes that happens. When you become a real sicario you’re given a mission, and you shoot whoever that mission concerns.”
The boy stared in confusion at the picture, turned it over, turned it back. The same face stared back at him. “I don’t know . . . Camilo?”
“He’s the mission. And you are a real sicario, right?”
The picture. The face. Two hundred dollars. The gun. Sicario.
“Yes. I am.” He nodded. “A real sicario.”
El Mestizo handed him a hundred-dollar bill and the weapon wrapped in cloth. “What’s your name?”
“Donzel.”
“Donzel? Good name. In about two hours, Donzel, Camilo will arrive by bus in Cali. And you’re also headed to Cali. But you’ll go with me, in my car. And when we get there I’m going to drop you off near a dark house. You’ll watch the house, keeping hidden, so Camilo doesn’t see you when he gets there. After Camilo goes in, wait. Until you hear the shots. Until he comes out, again, alone. It might happen fast or it might take a long time. You wait and wait, and when he comes out—then you finish your mission. With two shots, one to the head and one to the chest. Because sometimes it’s important, Donzel, to erase your tracks.”
El Mestizo was breathing slowly. Nothing was transparent. Everything had color.
IT SMELLED STRONGLY of tar. And something else. Maybe the remains of fish. Or, he imagined, it might be the metal buckets on the floor, the kind that used to transport fish, or the nets that hung so beautifully from the two long hooks on the wall—maybe what he saw around him reinforced a smell that wasn’t really there.
A tiny fishing cottage on an almost uninhabited island in the Stockholm archipelago, located on a cliff that led down to the Granholmen dock. Detective Inspector Sven Sundkvist carefully stretched out one leg then the other, he’d been sitting uncomfortably for nearly three hours. Night-vision binoculars in hand, and a ghostly stillness out on the bay, black water in two-knot wind.
“Here, your turn. Still just as quiet.”
He handed the binoculars to the man on his left—Chief Prosecutor Lars Ågestam, who was rocking back and forth on a simple wooden chair, and eagerly took over the task of staring out the window into the inky darkness. While the man on his right—a brigadier general he’d never met before and who led the special operation group, whose task it was to take care of any foreign submarines that might trespass on Swedish waters—sat there resolutely searching with a pair of his own night-vision binoculars just as he had since they got to the fishing cabin.
In the initial confusion both the police and military thought they’d be dealing with the kind of large submarines that had the technology and power to travel all the way from South America to Europe underwater, the sort the Spanish and Portuguese navies had been cracking down on more and more often in Cadiz, Faro, and Gibraltar. Constructed of lightweight materials, cheaper and safer than traditional drug smuggling. But when Ewert Grens briefly described the itinerary in a second email—how the sub would be traveling from a Venezuelan ship anchored fifteen kilometers off Aberdeen—preparations were hastily adjusted. And as soon as Sundkvist arrived at the small island he’d started to relax—the brigadier general and his crew seemed to know exactly what they were doing.
According to Grens’s information, the cocaine-packed submarine had gone underwater off the coast of Scotland and would cruise at a depth of thirty-five to forty meters through the North Sea with a heading set for Gothenburg, then they’d change course toward Öresund, passing between Sweden and Denmark, then around the southernmost tip of Sweden and enter the Baltic Sea, with their sights set on the Stockholm archipelago and the modest island of Södermöja. And then on to the much smaller Granholmen, which lay next to it. There, a bit out from Granholmen’s dock, the depths measured seventy-nine meters, and it would be easy to unload cargo onto speedboats that would head directly to the streets of the capital.
“Sven, here, your turn again.”
The prosecutor almost dropped the binoculars on the floor before Sven managed to grab hold of them. It wasn’t often this mild-mannered detective inspector got annoyed, after all, he chose to put up with a person like Ewert Grens, but he was indeed annoyed right now. He still didn’t understand why Ågestam, the man Grens hated most and who as recently as a few weeks ago had Grens locked up in jail, was sitting in this fishing cottage, why he would later be allowed to steal all the attention and adulation, all the credit he didn’t deserve. It was a unique tip, a unique seizure based on information Detective Superintendent Grens had managed to secure on his own—he, and his collaborators, should get the credit.
“Frigg to base. The subjects are in motion.”
The call over the brigadier general’s radio cut through the fishing cottage, bouncing off its brittle walls. Frigg. One of the corvettes that lay near the Sollenkroka pier overseeing radar directed toward Kanholmsfjärden and two unknown motorboats, actually transport boats, that had been sitting still on open water for the last half hour.
“The subjects are in motion—headed for the target.”
Now the two transport boats had started the next stage of their journey—headed for the decisive moment at Granholmen. The brigadier general brought the cordless radio close to his mouth.
“All units. Ready for combat.” He then turned first to the detective inspector, then to the chief prosecutor. “When the objects reach their rendezvous point, the mini-submarine will empty its tanks and surface for unloading.” He pointed into the darkness. With his whole hand. “That’s when we strike. When the submarine has emptied its tanks completely.”
Lars Ågestam smiled and his voice became shrill, as it so often did when powerful emotions took over. Whether he was angry, upset, scared, or filled with expectation, it sounded the same. “A record Swedish seizure! A Scandinavian record! It’s not often you get to be part of that.”
“Probably. Probably. But we’re not there yet, sir. Since there is one reservation. If the submarine, if . . .” The brigadier general was careful to look at Ågestam as he spoke. “. . . it were to discover us and try to dive again, and if I were to determine that it had the capacity to harm my staff or equipment, I would give the order to sink it with anti-sub grenades.”
“That must be avoided at all costs. We have to seize the goods. Catch them in the act!”
“Then the chief prosecutor would prefer that I shoot the crew instead—during the transfer?”
Ågestam waited, quietly.
“Because that’s the only thing that would guarantee they don’t disappear.”
The brigadier general continued to examine Ågestam’s now disappointed face. The prosecutor was certainly excited, so close to attaining publicity and praise. But he wasn’t the sort to deny reality to reach for it.
“Good, sir. Then I know where we stand.” Now the brigadier general lay his hand on Ågestam’s thin shoulder, as if to take back that disappointment. “But—you can keep fairly calm. It’s very unlikely to disappear. My people have this under control. It will most likely go as we planned.”
And then he leaned in close, whispering, despite the fact that this tiny cottage didn’t allow for secrets. “Between us, Ågestam—when you hear about a submarine hunt in our waters, it’s usually a sub of this kind. When the prime minister and the supreme commander call a press conference and show off some blurry photographs and say we can confirm that a small submarine has trespassed in Swedish waters, and then, when the information is reported by those useful idiots, they add analysts are unable to
determine the nationality of the intruders and all information concerning the violation is top secret. You follow? It’s not the Russians, it’s not espionage, but that’s what we let the public believe, let them read between the lines, so they’ll continue to say yes to defense spending. When really every time it’s about drugs being transported, and the capital that generates.”
The brigadier general adjusted his binoculars again, turned to the cottage’s single window and the black bay outside.
A ripple on the water, perhaps fifty meters straight out off the dock. A bow wave. The mini submarine was here, just under the surface, waiting to meet the transport boats.
The brigadier general picked up his radio. “Prepare to board.”
Sundkvist adjusted his binoculars’ focus from the water to the land and the three squads—twelve men from Special Ops—who were leaving the protection of the wooded shore and hurrying toward the dock. And when they reached it they hoisted three black, well-camouflaged combat boats into the water.
He then handed the binoculars to Ågestam again. “You have to see this. They’re ready.”
Lars Ågestam was able to follow as the soldiers lay down in the boats four by four to wait. For the submarine to surface and take position. For the crackdown to be implemented.
The chief prosecutor again turned his binoculars toward the water, searching for the exact location of Grens’s coordinates. Latitude 59.372905. Longitude 18.876421. Precisely where the submarine was supposed to surface, exactly where the transport boats would receive the plastic-wrapped Colombian cocaine, which they were responsible for shipping over that last stretch to Stockholm.
Stillness. Silence. Until that hum they’d all been waiting for. An almost tangible, thunderous buzz from the direction of Kanholmsfjärden. Increasing in intensity.
The two transport boats—now approaching Granholmen—suddenly stopped. The piercing sound faded and was replaced by a brilliant flash of light as both boats turned their headlights to the surface of the water. To the place where the mini-sub’s turret was cutting the surface and opening its hatch.
Three Minutes Page 39
