The churchyard was being guarded by a patrol from Uppsala Police, who had cordoned off the area. No visitors were allowed inside the blue-andwhite plastic tape, no priests, no church wardens. Two patrol cars had come from Arlanda and another two from Stockholm and he had positioned one at each corner of the concrete wall that surrounded the prison. He now had four police officers from Aspsås district, and as many again each from Uppsala, Arlanda, and Stockholm, and when the twelve remaining members of the national task force arrived shortly, a total of thirty-seven police officers would be in place to watch, protect, attack.
John Edvardson was tense. He stood in the churchyard looking at the gray wall and felt the unease that had been there from the start, gnawing at him, irritating him, yet he couldn't put a finger on it, there was something… something that wasn't right.
Hoffmann.
The man over there who had threatened to kill again, it didn't fit.
In the past decade, Edvardson guessed there had been two, maybe three hostage takings a year in Swedish prisons. And each time the national task force was called in, with the same predictable scenario. An inmate had somehow managed to get hold of moonshine somewhere in the prison and had got steaming drunk, and then come to the conclusion that he had been wronged and treated unfairly, by the female prison staff in particular and, with the grandiosity that so often accompanies intoxication, had acted on impulse, become potent, dangerous, and had taken hostage some poor twenty-nine-year-old female warden who was only working there for the summer, rusty screwdriver to her throat. The alarm had been raised and two dozen specially trained police marksmen had been called out and then it was just a matter of time-the amount of time it took for the alcohol to leave his system and for it to gradually dawn on the hungover prisoner where the balance of power actually lay-before he gave himself up with hands above his head, and as a result was given a farther six years and more stringent terms for leave.
But Hoffmann didn't fit that pattern.
According to the wardens he had locked up in two separate cells, he was not under the influence, his actions were planned, each step seemed to have been analyzed, he was not acting on impulse, but with purpose.
John Edvardson turned up the volume on his radio when he gave out instructions for the twelve members of the task force who had just arrived: four outside the door into the workshop in Block B to set up microphones, five to scale the walls of the building to get up onto the roof with more listening equipment, and three to reinforce those already out in the stairwell.
He was closing in on the workshop and he had sealed off the churchyard.
He had done everything that he could and should for the moment. The next step was up to the hostage taker.
The heavy steel door into the third floor of the police headquarters was open. Ewert Grens ran his card through the card-reader, punched in a four-digit code and waited while the wrought-iron gate slid open. He went into the small space and over to the box with a number on it, opening it with his key and taking out the gun that he seldom used. The magazine was full and he pushed it into place: ammunition with a slightly pitted jacket, which was compensated for with something that looked like transparent glass, the kind of bullet that tore things to shreds. He then hurried back to Homicide, slowed down as he passed Sven Sundkvist's office, we've got a job, Sven, and I want to see you and Hermansson in the garage in fifteen minutes and I want to know what we've got in our database for 721018-0010, then rushed on. Sven may have answered something, but in that case he didn't hear.
There was something up on the roof.
Scraping noises, shuffling noises.
Piet Hoffmann was standing by the pile of fiberglass tiles. He had made the right decision. If they had still been up there under the ceiling, they would have swallowed and muffled the small movements that were now happening above his head.
More scraping sounds.
This time outside the door.
They were up the church tower, on the roof, by the door. They were reducing his field of action. There were enough of them now to guard the prison and still prepare for an assault on several fronts.
He picked up the square fiberglass tiles and threw them, one after the other, at the door. They would hear it. They would be standing out there with their listening equipment and they would know that it was now more difficult to get in; that there was something in the way that would take another second to pass, the extra time a person holding a gun needs to shoot his hostages.
Mariana Hermansson was driving far too fast, sirens wailing and blue lights flashing. They were now some distance north of Stockholm and were strangely silent, perhaps remembering previous hostage takings, or earlier visits to the prison as part of their day-to-day investigations. Sven rummaged around in the glove compartment and after a while managed to find what he was looking for, as he usually did: two cassettes of Siwan's sixties hits. He put one into the player, as they had always listened to Grens's past in order to avoid talking and gloss over the realisation that they didn't have much to say to each other.
"Take that out!"
Ewert had raised his voice and Sven wasn't sure that he understood why. "I thought-"
"Take it out, Sven! Show some respect for my grief."
"You mean-"
"Respect. Grief."
Sven ejected the cassette and put it back in the glove compartment, careful to close it in a way that Ewert would see and hear. He rarely understood his boss and he had learned not to ask questions, that sometimes it was easier just to let people's peculiarities be just that. He himself was one of the boring ones, someone who didn't seek out conflict, who didn't demand answers in order to position himself in the hierarchy. He had long since decided that those who were anxious and lacked confidence could do that,
"The hostage taker?"
"What about him?"
"Have you got the background then?"
"Hold on a sec."
Sven Sundkvist pulled a document out of an envelope and then put on his glasses. The first page, from the criminal intelligence database, had the special code that was only used for a handful of criminals. He passed it to Grens.
KNOWN DANGEROUS ARMED
"One of those."
Ewert Grens sighed. One of the ones who always meant reinforcement or special units with specially trained policemen whenever an arrest was planned. One of the ones who had no limits.
"More?"
"Criminal record. Ten years for possession of amphetamines. But it's the earlier conviction that's interesting for us."
"Right."
"Five years. Attempted murder. Aggravated assault of a police officer." Sven Sundkvist looked at the next document.
"I've also got the grounds for judgment. When he was arrested in Söderhamn, the hostage taker first hit a policeman in the face several times with the butt of a gun, then fired two shots at him, one in the thigh and one in the left upper arm."
Ewert Grens put his hand up.
His face had turned a shade of red. He leaned back, and drew his other hand through his thinning hair.
"Piet Hoffmann."
Sven Sundkvist was taken aback.
"How do you know that?"
"That's what he's called."
"I hadn't even read his name yet, but, yes, he is called that. Ewert. how did you know?"
The red in Ewert's face deepened, his breathing was perhaps more labored.
"I read the judgment, Sven, precisely that goddamn judgment less than twenty-four hours ago. It was Piet Hoffmann I was going to see when I went to Aspsås in connection with the murder at Västmannagatan 79."
"I don't understand."
Ewert Grens shook his head slowly.
"He's one of the three names I was going to question and eliminate from the Västmannagatan investigation. Piet Hoffmann. I don't know why or how, but he was one of them, Sven."
The churchyard should have been beautiful. The sun was shining through the high, green leaves, the gravel paths had recently been raked an
d the grass was in neat squares in front of the gravestones that stood silently waiting for the next visitors. But the beauty was an illusion, a facade that when they got closer was replaced with danger, anxiety, and tension, and the visitors had replaced their watering cans and flowers with semiautomatics and black visors. John Edvardson met them at the gate and they hurried toward the white church with the high steps up to a closed wooden door. Edvardson handed the binoculars to Ewert Grens, waiting in silence while the detective superintendent looked and found the right window.
"That part of the workshop."
Ewert Grens handed the binoculars to Hermansson.
"There's only one entrance and exit to that part of the workshop. If you want to take hostages… that's completely the wrong place to go."
"We've heard them talking."
"Both of them?"
"Yes. They're alive. So we can't go in."
The room that was to the right just inside the church door wasn't particularly big, but it was big enough to be made into a control post. A room where the immediate family would gather before a funeral, or the bride and groom would wait before a wedding. Sven and Hermansson moved the chairs back to the wall while Edvardson went over to the small wooden altar and unfolded a plan of the whole prison and then a detailed plan of the workshop.
"And visible… all the time?"
"I could order the marksmen to shoot at any time. But it's too far. Fifteen hundred and three meters. I can only guarantee that our weapons will hit at max six hundred meters."
Ewert Grens pointed a finger at the drawing and the window that, for the moment, was their only contact with a person who had committed murder a few hours ago.
"He knows that we can't shoot him from here, and behind bars, behind reinforced glass… he feels safe."
"He thinks that he's safe."
Grens looked at Edvardson.
"Thinks?"
"We can't shoot him. Not with our equipment. But it is possible."
There was a drawing lying on the large conference table in one of the corner rooms in the Government Offices. It was bright and the light from the ceiling blended with light from the high window with a view over the water at Norrström and Riddarfjärden. Fredrik Göransson smoothed the folds in the stiff paper with his hand and moved it so that it would be easier for the national police commissioner and the state secretary to see.
"Here, this building nearest the wall, is Block B. And here, on the second floor, is the workshop."
The three faces leaned over the table and, with the help of a piece of paper, studied a place they had never visited.
"So Hoffmann is standing here. Close to him, on the floor, are the hostages. A prisoner and a warden. Completely naked."
It was hard to comprehend, from the straight lines on the architect's drawing, that there was someone standing there, threatening to kill.
"According to Edvardson, he has been totally exposed in the window since the national task force arrived."
Göransson moved the files and a thick folder with the Prison and Probation Service documents from the table onto one of the chairs in order to make more space, and when that wasn't sufficient he moved the thermos and three mugs. He then unrolled a map of Aspsås district and with a felt pen drew a straight line from the squares that were the various prison buildings across the green area and open space to one of the other rectangles on the map, the one marked with a cross.
"The church. Exactly fifteen hundred and three meters away. The only place with a view that is clear enough for the snipers. And Hoffmann knows that, Edvardson is sure of it. He knows that the police don't have the equipment to reach him and that's what he's telling us by standing there."
There was a little coffee left in the thermos and the stare secretary poured herself half a cup. Then she got up and moved away, looked at her visitors and spoke in a quiet voice.
"You should have informed me yesterday."
She didn't expect an answer.
"You've maneuvered us into a corner."
She was shaking with rage. She looked at them one at a time, then lowered her voice even more.
"You have forced him to action. And now I don't have any choice, I have to act as well."
She continued to look at them as she walked toward the door. "I'll be back in fifteen minutes."
Each step had been painful, and when Ewert Grens spied the aluminum ladder that led up to a hatch in the church tower, his stiff leg protested with a series of small sharp twinges that obliterated any other thoughts. He said nothing when he slipped on the first rung, nor when his chest seemed to push up into his throat a few rungs up. His forehead shone with sweat and his arms were numb when he hauled himself through the wooden hatch and banged his head on the edge of the heavy cast iron bell, cutting himself. He lay down and managed to creep the final stretch to the door that led our onto the balcony and the cooling breeze.
They now had forty-six police officers positioned outside the prison, inside the prison, outside the church, and two up here, in the church tower-marksmen who were keeping an eye through binoculars on a window on the second floor of Block B.
"There are two possibilities. The railway bridge over there is probably a couple of hundred meters closer, but the angle is harder and the target area is too small. Whereas from here the target area is perfect. We have full view of him. But we have a problem. Our marksmen use a gun which is called a PSG 90 and is designed for firing distances of around six hundred meters. That's what our men are trained for. And the distance from here is far greater, Ewert."
Ewert Grens had gotten up and was now standing at the far end of the narrow balcony, gripping the railing with his hands. He saw the shadow again, Hoffmann's shadow.
"And what does that mean?"
"The distance is impossible. For us."
"Impossible?"
"The greatest known distance that a sniper has covered successfully is two thousand, one hundred and seventy-five meters. A Canadian marksman.),
"So?"
"So what?"
"So it's not impossible."
"Impossible. For us."
"But it's nearly nine hundred meters less! So what's the bloody problem?" "The problem is that we have no officers who can shoot at that distance. We don't have the training. We don't have the equipment."
Grens turned toward Edvardson and the balcony shook-he was heavy and he had pulled hard at the railing.
"Who?"
"Who what?"
"Who does? Have the training? The equipment?"
"The army. They train our marksmen. They have the training. And they have the equipment."
"Then get one of them here. Now."
The balcony shook again. Ewert Grens was agitated and his ponderous body swayed as he tossed his head and stamped his foot. John Edvardson waited until he was done; he normally didn't care that much when the detective superintendent tried to look menacing.
"It doesn't work quite like that. The armed forces can't be used for police matters.
"We're talking about someone's life!"
"Statute SFS 2002:375. Ordinance on support for civil activities by the Swedish Armed Forces. I can read it for you, if you like. Paragraph seven."
"I don't give a damn about that."
"It's Swedish law, Ewert."
He had listened to them moving around on the roof, small movements, they were there the whole time, they were ready and waiting.
Then there was a crackling in his earpiece.
"The army. They train our marksmen. They have the training. And they have the equipment."
Pier Hoffmann smiled.
"Then get one of them here. Now."
He smiled again, but only inside. He was careful to stand in profile, his shoulder at a right angle to the window.
The equipment, the training, the know-how.
A sniper. A military sniper.
The map of Aspsås district was still lying on the conference table when the state secretary returned
to the room and made a point of closing the door behind her.
"So, let's continue."
She had been tense and flushed when she left the room fifteen minutes ago, and whatever it was she had done, whoever it was she had spoken to, had done the trick-she looked calmer, and she was resolute and concentrated as she drank the rest of her coffee.
"The log book?"
She nodded at one of the files that had been moved from the table. "Yes?"
"Give it to me."
Göransson handed her the thick black file and she noticed as she leafed through that the pages were handwritten alternately in black and blue ballpoint pen.
Are all the meetings between your handler and this Hoffmann recorded here?"
“Yes.”
"And this is the only copy?"
"It's the copy that I keep as CHIS controller. The only one."
"Destroy it."
She put the file down on the table and pushed it over toward Göransson. "Are there any other formal links between the police authority and Hoffmann?"
Göransson shook his head.
"No. Not for him. Not for any other informant. That's not how we work." He seemed to relax a bit.
"Hoffmann has been paid by us for nine years. But only from the account that we call reward money. An account that can't be linked to personal data and therefore doesn't need to be reported to the tax authorities. He's not on any payrolls. Formally, he doesn't exist for us."
The file with the Prison and Probation Service documents was still lying on one of the chairs.
"And that one? Is that his?"
"That's only about him."
She opened it, looked through the printouts and reports about his mental health.
"And this is all?"
"That is our picture of him."
"Our picture?"
"The image we've created."
"And the overall image… if I can put it like this… does it give a sufficient basis for the gold commander to make a clear decision about Hoffmann… well, the consequences of the hostage taking?"
The room brightened as the sun flooded in and the white sheets of paper intensified and reflected the light.
"It was a sufficiently strong image for him to be accepted by the mafia branch that he penetrated. We've since developed it to make him totally credible in relation to the work inside Aspsås."
Three Seconds Page 30
