Three Minutes

by Anders Roslund

  He should drive back. Now.

  I don’t like you leaving here. Not tonight, Piet. We have so little time left. To risk it . . .

  He started the car, but the shaking was still there. Just like the cover of darkness. And he decided.

  If he drove fast through the still sleeping city, if he avoided the brothel customers on their way in and out, it would only take him an extra fifteen, twenty minutes, tops.

  He parked behind El Mestizo’s black, square Mercedes G-Wagen, opened the trunk, and carefully shone his flashlight. He had everything he needed. Next to the no longer empty suitcase stood a bag with a remote control and four fastening magnets. And next to that—the bomb.

  Cesar’s work. Essentially, an ordinary car alarm. Now placed in a case with a black outer shell and a metal lid approximately the size of a box of chocolates, also containing one twelve-volt battery and a bunch of screw nuts and C-4 explosives.

  Music from the brothel spilled out of a couple of open windows, he thought he could even hear the clink of glasses and bottles. A few customers, middle-aged men, were on their way out. After their lively discussion, they stepped into a waiting taxi and silence followed.

  That was when he acted. A minute or so, total. He picked up the bomb, crept closer to the brothel owner’s car, lay down on the asphalt, and turned the key on the bomb’s cover, which switched on its battery. Then he crawled under the vehicle. The four magnets fastened it right where he wanted it—under the driver’s seat. The last thoughts that passed through El Mestizo’s brain would continue up through the car’s roof.

  Hoffmann crept out again, checked to make sure no one had noticed him, a couple of quick steps back to his own car. He rolled down the side window, aimed the remote at El Mestizo’s car, and activated the alarm. That was why it was so important to keep the vibration sensor.

  He would be far away when the time came a few hours from now, unable to take part—the sensor, however, would know when El Mestizo sat down in the seat and started the engine. And instead of sending the signal to the horn, the one that would normally set off the alarm, the signal would instead arrive in the cartridge and trigger the bomb.

  AIRPORTS. HE HADN’T been in that many, hadn’t been interested. Stockholm and the police station filled his days, evenings, nights. After two trips to and from Washington and now a sixth visit to El Dorado International in Bogotá, he was still convinced. Ewert Grens needed the world just as little as the world needed him.

  Nevertheless. What he saw in front of him this morning was worth every moment of the trip, might even make him want to return to this South American country that he still didn’t really understand.

  A family. A father, a mother, a big brother, a little brother. And they were going home. And Grens would always know he’d helped to make it happen.

  “Hello. My name is Ewert. Uncle Ewert.” He crouched as best he could with his aching leg and held a big hand out to a small one. “And are you . . . Rasmus?”

  “I’m Sebastian.”

  Grens winked, whispered. “I know your real name is Rasmus. A fine name. And after we’ve landed in Sweden, you’ll be Rasmus again.”

  Rasmus glanced at his father, worried. Hoffmann nodded slightly, and also whispered.

  “Uncle Ewert . . . he knows.”

  And the six-year-old face softened. “Rasmus. For real.”

  Grens nodded too—they had a secret together. And then he turned to the slightly taller boy.

  “So that must mean your name is . . .”

  “Hugo. I never liked William.”

  “And I’ve never . . .” Grens leaned in closer, whispering right into the boy’s ear. “. . . liked Ewert. But your name is your name. And so it becomes you in the end.”

  They smiled at each other. They too had a secret.

  “I’m Zofia. For real.”

  Zofia Hoffmann suddenly hugged him. He wasn’t prepared, not used to that.

  “Thank you, Superintendent. For everything.”

  So it wasn’t much of a hug back.

  “No problem. It was my attempt to make up for once trying to kill your husband.”

  Piet Hoffmann, however, neither greeted nor hugged him. They’d be spending time with each other after they landed at Arlanda. They could say good-bye then. Or whatever it was they needed to say.

  The speakers crackled and announced something about a plane landing and another one that was getting ready to take off. Travelers wandered around, preparing for new meetings. And the small group of five Swedes headed toward the check-in lines. Each with their own suitcase. The woman behind the counter smiled at Grens’s brown, patchy, outdated suitcase with its Eiffel Tower sticker in one corner. The two boys had considerably smaller and more colorful suitcases, red and yellow, and they made sure to carry them all the way to the scale on their own. Zofia’s had a green ribbon tied onto one handle, he’d seen others use a similar trick because so many bags looked the same spinning around the baggage claim. Hoffmann’s bag looked new, also big and brown like his own, but the leather was so shiny you could almost see yourself in it. The woman in an airline uniform weighed the bags and placed small stickers here and there, asked if they’d packed their luggage themselves, reminded them that bags should contain no explosives, and informed them their luggage would be inspected by detection dogs before passing through customs.

  One hour to departure. Six hours to New York. Two-hour layover. And another eight hours to Stockholm.

  Piet and Zofia Hoffmann were no longer carrying any suitcases; they held on tight to each other’s hands and breathed as calmly as they could. It would be early morning when, after three long terrible years, they set foot on Swedish soil again.

  PART FIVE

  EWERT GRENS ALWAYS felt this fear just as they were landing. It seemed to confirm the insanity of it all. You were in the air. In a machine. With no control over your life or death. What if the man in the pilot’s cabin—and it was a man, that much was clear from the announcements over the speaker—was having a bad day, or under the influence of something, or just inept? How could several hundred people who wore helmets when they rode their mopeds, used seat belts in their cars, who locked their front doors every time they left home, people who loved their own lives more than anything, put those lives into the hands of a person they’d never met, never had the chance to judge?

  A quick glance behind him in the cabin. There they sat, the whole Hoffmann family—seats A, B, C, D, on both sides of the aisle. A little tired, a little happy, a little worried. He’d made sure to travel separately from them, with several rows of seats in between, so they wouldn’t exit together, would arouse no suspicions, just in case the conversation Grens was about to have went to hell. Grens and Hoffmann had agreed to as much. If the short prison sentence the detective had promised was impossible to negotiate, then Peter Haraldsson would calmly say good-bye to his wife and two children, grab his shiny new suitcase, buy a ticket, and continue his journey elsewhere.

  Grens closed his eyes as the wheels met the runway, clenched his hands as it bounced heavily, breathed slowly as the plane lurched from left to right. Only opened his eyes cautiously when they came to a complete stop. Never again. He always promised that to himself.

  He stepped into the jetway that connected the airplane to the main terminal and nodded to all his fellow police officers and the customs officials lined up there. They had their detection dogs on a tight leash near the front, smelling each bag that passed by, and, after asking out of curiosity, he learned they often did that when a plane arrived bearing several passengers from Colombia. He continued on through the buzzing aisles of the international terminal, on to the hall with the spinning baggage claim, through passport control, and then on toward the tunnel that led to the parking garages and fresh air—Grens didn’t stop until he entered a reserved room a bit to the right of the Arlanda airport police station. He wasn’t worried about Hoffmann, who knew where to wait.

  Chief Prosecutor Lars Ågestam w
as already sitting there. A handkerchief in hand, he coughed and blew his nose loudly. An empty teacup on the table, his blond bangs in unusual disorder, irritated eyes behind brown frames—he had arrived on time but the plane had been delayed forty-five minutes. Since their very first case together—a five-year-old murdered by a serial pedophile—the prosecutor had thought as little of Grens as Grens thought of the prosecutor, and at this point neither of them even tried to pretend otherwise. It had given the prosecutor great satisfaction to have the detective locked up in a wine-soaked suit. And now, an hour had been wasted as he slowly realized who he was waiting for. This hardly strengthened their relationship.

  “Grens.”

  “That’s right, yours truly. And you seem to have caught a cold, Ågestam. Heard you decided to go swimming with your clothes on.”

  “So it’s for your sake I’m sitting here?”

  Grens walked over to the simple—not quite clean—coffee maker, filled it with water and loaded it with Swedish coffee grounds. He’d started to get used to the richer varieties available in another part of the world. It was time to get back to what he could expect here, and this generic discount coffee served in a plastic cup was truly an excellent start.

  “For my sake. For your sake. And for the sake of an old acquaintance. We have what the finance idiots would call a win-win-win situation on our hands.”

  “Grens, dammit! I was convinced to come here by Sven Sundkvist. Or rather lured! Because he told me I was going to meet the brains behind this week’s record drug bust, which you missed while you were on . . . where exactly is it you’ve been . . . on vacation? You’re looking a little sunburnt. Yes, the brains and maybe even get another tip. That’s what he said. So now, Grens, I really don’t understand.”

  “The brains? You flatter me. But you’re not entirely wrong.” The detective sat down in front of the much younger prosecutor, smacked his lips a bit as he filled the plastic cup to half.

  “So here’s how it is. There will be a new delivery in three days. I can give you the date, time, location. Not as big as the last one, but still enough kilos to qualify as one of the biggest Swedish cocaine busts ever. And it would be, if I were to choose to give it to you, Lars Ågestam’s second huge bust in a very short period of time.”

  Ågestam ran his hands through his bangs as he always did when he was stressed, unusually disordered hair turning into chaos. “How do you know this?”

  “Heavy reconnaissance. Unique reasoning. Razor-sharp analysis.” Grens tried not to smile. He couldn’t help it. He was enjoying himself too much. “Or, if I’m being honest, a tipster. The world’s best tipster. He was the one who delivered that last bust to us. And he’ll give us this one too if you cooperate. It’s actually for his sake that I asked you to come here.”

  Lars Ågestam rarely looked this lost. Superior, irritable, overbearing, yes—all of which Ewert Grens had come to recognize and despise. But he’d never truly seen the prosecutor at a loss. Now he was.

  “Please, Grens, I . . . what’s this all about?”

  “When a person takes a drug they become dependent on it. Want more.”

  “Dependent? More?”

  “Like you. You want more. You know how this works. These big busts build careers. And this time, Ågestam, you won’t even need to get wet.”

  Ågestam leaned back in his uncomfortable wooden chair to avoid Grens’s smile. Sighed out loud. Stood up. Wandered around the table. Drank a glass of water. Stretched. Sighed again. And sat back down. “Okay, Grens. What do you want me to do?”

  “You need to give me something in exchange.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You have to use your—yes, I admit it, but will never confirm it outside this room—keen intellect. You need to find a rationale for why a murderer, who has been on the run from Swedish justice for several years, would end up serving a prison sentence of no more than a year.”

  ONE HOUR. That’s how long it took Lars Ågestam to understand, really understand, how a dead man had been resurrected in South America and had made his way to Stockholm. How he’d been marked for death again by another nation’s highest leaders. How to avoid that fate he’d offered and then managed to rescue the world’s most high-profile hostage. And that still he’d been ordered to die a second time, and so he’d done just that, died. And then to understand, truly understand, that that very man was now sitting somewhere in the airport with his family awaiting the outcome of this conversation.

  “No, I have to follow the law.”

  “Another record-breaking bust, Ågestam. If you follow the law in such a way that the trial ends as we want it to.”

  “He took a life on Swedish soil. At least one person. Maybe two.”

  “He was employed by us, did so indirectly on our behalf. Just as he was employed by, and killed for, another authority in Colombia. And we’ve already put away the real bad guys—the minister of justice is at the Hinseberg Women’s Penitentiary, a former national police commissioner and chief superintendent both in protective custody at Aspsås prison.”

  “He has to be punished.”

  “You know you want it, you know you want that tip. You’ll never, ever get another chance at these kinds of quantities again. And you know it’s possible, with effort, to find mitigating circumstances.”

  There stood a law book in an overlooked bookcase in the police station’s break room. It was as if Ågestam had sniffed it out, almost gone straight for it when, mumbling to himself, he’d left the detective. He was carrying the thick book when he returned and sat down.

  “I would probably . . . could . . . well, maybe . . . write that Hoffmann on x day in x month deprived so-and-so of life by shooting.”

  They both remembered. The world’s smallest pistol smuggled in in pieces and reassembled in Hoffmann’s prison cell. For use in case of an emergency, if he were to be discovered. If the Polish mafia he’d infiltrated behind those high walls were to realize he was actually working for the Swedish police. And then he was discovered. There was an emergency. And a shot through one eye was the surest point of entry for a weak weapon to trick the skull, the body’s hardest bone, into allowing entry into the brain.

  “And furthermore . . . strictly hypothetically, Grens . . . I could argue as the prosecutor—and get away with it—that according to mitigating circumstances this act should be considered manslaughter.” Lars Ågestam flipped back and forth in the statute book, searching through its endless, onionskin pages. “I don’t think you need to argue for the manslaughter itself—it’s enough for the prosecutor to merely state that. Furthermore, I would explain to the court why I see it as manslaughter, probably during . . .” More onionskin pages. Those slim fingers burrowing through sections and paragraphs. “. . . the presentation of the case, and especially in my plea. Then I could—strictly hypothetically—explain that the situation was such that Hoffmann found himself in danger from a whole group, a lynch mob, and that there was no premeditation. That—and this sounds more like something from the defense, but sometimes a prosecutor defends as well—the weapon he used just happened to be there. And when he saw the mob—mob is a good term for a defense lawyer, but maybe not for a prosecutor, so I’d probably avoid that word after all—when he saw the crowd headed toward him, he had to make a choice between himself and them.”

  They’d sat like this once before. Cooperating. At home in Grens’s kitchen, over a whiskey and with hundreds of wrongful convictions in front of them on the table, all of them the consequence of the illegal and therefore hidden work of Hoffmann and other criminal informants. It had felt good then, almost as if they could actually stand each other. It felt like that now as well.

  “Therefore, Grens, he’s ended up in a situation where I can neither prove nor disprove an act of self-defense—and it is the prosecutor who is supposed to disprove it. Thus, I would ask for a lower penalty. I’d explain that the situation was as I’ve described, and that it would have been close to impossible for him to a
lter his course, I therefore would ask for, say . . . three years. As the prosecutor. Then his defense lawyer would vividly describe the mob that came after the accused and how he was lucky enough to have a weapon on hand. Perhaps it wasn’t the best choice to shoot to kill, but we’re talking about manslaughter, his lawyer would say, even the prosecutor agrees. In addition, his lawyer would point out that Hoffmann voluntarily returned home and that should be reflected in the sentence—and then he or she would ask for six months.”

  Grens didn’t hug Ågestam. But almost. “Six months, Ågestam?”

  The prosecutor held up his hands as if to protect himself. He didn’t want to get any closer than they were. “Yes. And then the court, with luck, would sentence him to a year.”

  “And he’d be released after maybe . . . eight months?”

  “Yes.”

  Lars Ågestam had just lowered his hands. That was why he didn’t have time to protect himself—again. As the burly detective threw himself across the table and hugged the prosecutor hard. Grens had moved so much faster than anyone would ever expect.

  “You’ve earned your tip, Ågestam! I’ll be damned if you didn’t earn another hug as well!”

  And so the slender prosecutor received a bear hug from thick arms that didn’t let go until the cheeks of the man receiving the hug turned red from lack of oxygen.

  The Hoffmann family sat in a corner at one of the small cafés that had sprouted up in the glassed-in hall between the international terminal and Terminal 4. Mineral water and some yellowish juice stood on the table in an irregular ring around crumbly, greasy, Swedish cinnamon buns. Grens didn’t say a word as he approached—but Piet could see it on him anyway, they’d gotten what they were asking for. So four people held each other tight, while the detective went to a kiosk and took his time picking out newspapers. This was their moment, and it should last just as long as they wanted it to.