The big window.
A naked, sixty-four-year-old man.
He remembered another person, another hostage, nearly twenty years ago now, but he could still feel the choking rage. Some children in care, lethal and criminal, had planned to escape, so they decided they needed a hostage and had assaulted a retired woman who was doing some extra work in the kitchen. Cheap screwdriver to her throat, they chose the weakest member of staff and she had later died, not while she was being held hostage but as a result of it-they had somehow stolen her life from her and she didn't know how to take it back.
This was just as bloody cowardly, just as premeditated, the oldest member of the staff, the weakest in the group.
"I want to take him out of action."
"What do you mean."
"Injure him."
"I can't."
"Can't? I just explained-"
"I can't, as I would have to shoot at his torso. And from here… the target's too small. If I was to shoot at one of his arms, say, first of all there is a risk that I would miss, and second, if I did hit one arm, other parts of his body would also be shot to bits."
Sterner handed the gun to Grens.
The black, almost skinny weapon was heavier than he had imagined, he guessed about fifteen kilos, the hard edges pressing against his palm. "That sniper gun… the force of impact would destroy a human body." "And if you hit him?"
"He'll die."
The earpiece had almost fallen out a couple of times so he kept his finger on it, like before, every word was crucial.
"Injure him."
Something crackled, a disturbance. He changed ears-the reception wasn't any better. He concentrated, listened, he had to-had to-understand every word.
`And if you hit him?"
"He'll die."
That was enough.
Piet Hoffmann crossed the room to the small office with a desk at the back. He pulled open the top drawer and picked up the razor that was lying in an otherwise empty compartment between the pens and paperclips, then a pair of scissors from the pencil case. He carried on to the storeroom, to the warden called Jacobson who was still sitting against the wall. Hoffmann checked the plastic packing tape round his wrists and ankles, then with one tug he pulled down the curtain from the window and, picking up the rug from the floor, he went back into the workshop and the other hostage.
The little plastic pockets of nitroglycerine were still attached to his skin. The pentyl fuse was tightly wound around his body. Hoffmann met his pleading eyes as he threw the rug over him and secured it with the curtain.
He pushed the barrel of diesel by the workbench over and positioned it by the hostage's legs.
He groped under the rug, found the detonator and taped it to one end of the pentyl fuse.
Then he went back to the window, looked up at the church tower, and at the gun that was pointing at him.
They were standing by one of the tall windows on the second floor of the Government Offices. They had just opened the thin glass window wide and were drinking in the fresh, cool air. They were ready. Forty-five minutes earlier they had informed the gold commander on site at Aspsås church that he would shortly have the military marksman he had requested. He was already on his way.
What was irresolvable was now resolvable.
Everything was in place for a decision to be made based on the available documentation.
A decision that was Ewert Grens's alone, that he would shortly make on his own and for which he would be solely responsible.
He had never been in a church tower before. Not as far as he could remember. Maybe as a child, on some school trip traipsing behind an ambitious class teacher. Strange, really-all these years of training and he had never fired from such an obvious place: a church that was the highest point here as in many other places. He leaned back against the wall and looked at the heavy cast iron bell. He was sitting in there alone, resting as he should do, as a marksman always does before firing, a moment of peace in his own world while the observer stayed with the gun.
He had arrived at the church an hour earlier. In five hours' time he would be back in Kungsangen, he would have left his temporary post with the police and have been re-employed by the army. On his way here he had assumed it was a matter of shooting at an inanimate target. But that was not the case. In a few minutes he was going to do something he had never done before. Aim and fire a loaded gun at a person.
A real person.
The kind that breathes and thinks and will be missed by someone. "Object in view."
He wasn't afraid of firing the shot, of his ability to hit the target.
But he was afraid of the consequences, the internal ones, which you can never prepare for, like what death does to the person who kills.
"I repeat. Object in view."
The observer's voice was urgent. Sterner went out into the light wind, lay down, held the weapon steady in his hands, waited. The shadow in the window. He looked at the observer-he felt the same thing, had made the same observation: neither of them were convinced that the man standing down there in profile didn't realize that it was in fact possible to hit him at this distance.
"Preparing to fire."
The heavy detective superintendent with the aggressive manner and a stiff leg that looked like it hurt more than he wanted to show was standing directly behind him.
"If Hoffmann doesn't withdraw his threat, I'm going to order you to shoot. His time runs out in thirteen minutes. Are you ready?"
"Yes."
"And the ammo?"
Sterner didn't turn around, he stayed lying on his stomach the whole time, facing the prison, his eye focused on the telescopic sight and a window on the top of Block B.
"With the correct information, I would have loaded and used the undercalibrated ammunition that is leaving Kungsingen in a helicopter this very moment and that won't get here in time. With this… if I'm going to penetrate reinforced glass to hit the target… it'll work. But I repeat… it isn't possible just to injure him. Once it's fired, the shot will be lethal."
The door was shut.
Brown, maybe oak, several scratches around the lock, a set of keys that scraped the door a little each time a key was turned twice in the stiff barrel. Mariana Hermansson knocked lightly on the door.
No footsteps, no voice-if anyone was in there they didn't move, or say anything, it was someone who didn't want to make contact.
On Ewert's order she had gone to look for the prison doctor on the other side of the large prison, inside the same walls, but several hundred meters away from the workshop and Hoffmann and the risk of more death. In Block C, through one of the hospital unit's small windows, she had watched a prisoner coughing in bed while a man in a white coat explained to her that 0913 Hoffmann had never been in any of the beds, that the symptoms of an epidemic had never been identified and that isolation had therefore never been ordered.
Ewert Grens had come up against a lie. The chief warden had prevented him from questioning an inmate. And right now that prisoner was holding a gun to a principal officer's head.
She knocked again, harder.
She pressed the handle down.
The door was unlocked.
Lennart Oscarsson was sitting in a dark leather armchair, his elbows on the wide desk in front, his head in his hands. His breathing was labored, deep and irregular, and she could see his forehead and cheeks shining in the harsh ceiling light; it could be sweat, it could be tears. He hadn't even noticed her coming into his office, that she was now standing only a few meters from him.
"Mariana Hermansson, City Police."
He jumped.
"I'd like to ask a few questions, about Hoffmann."
He looked at her.
"He is a dead man."
She chose to stay where she was.
"He said that."
His eyes were evasive-she tried to catch them, but couldn't, they were always somewhere else.
"He is a dead man. He said that!"
<
br /> She didn't know what she had expected. But it wasn't this. Someone who was on the verge.
"His name is Martin. Did you know that? One of my best friends. No, more than that, my closest friend. The oldest employee at Aspsås. Forty years. He's been here forty years! And now… now he's going to die." She pursued the darting eyes.
"Yesterday, Ewert Grens, a detective superintendent who is in fact leading the operation right now from the church tower, was here. He came to question one of the prisoners. Piet Hoffmann."
The square monitor.
"If Martin dies…"
The mouth that moved so slowly.
"If he dies…"
He is a dead man.
"I don't know if-"
"You said that it wasn't possible. That Hoffmann was ill. That he was in isolation in the hospital unit."
"-I don't know that I could bear that."
Lennart Oscarsson hadn't heard her.
"I have just been to Block C. I spoke to Nycander. Hoffmann was never there."
The mouth.
"You lied."
Moving.
"You lied. Why?"
When it moves slowly on that monitor, it looks like it's talking about death.
"Oscarsson! Listen to me! A person is lying dead on the floor in one of the corridors in Block B. Two other people have exactly nine minutes left to live. We need to make a decision. We need your answer!"
"Would you like a cup of coffee?"
"Why did you lie? What is this all about?"
"Or tea?"
"Who is Hoffmann?"
"I've got green and red and normal tea in bags. The sort that you dunk."
Large drops of sweat fell from the governor's face onto the shiny desktop when he got up and walked over to a glass and gold-frame cart stacked with porcelain cups and saucers in the corner of the room.
"We need an answer. Why? Why did you lie?"
"It's important not to leave it in too long."
He didn't look at her, didn't turn round despite the fact that she had raised her voice for the first time. He held one of the cups under the thermos and filled it with steaming water, then carefully dropped a bag with a picture of a red rosehip attached into the middle.
"About two minutes. No more."
She was losing him.
"Would you like milk?"
They needed him.
"Sugar? Both perhaps?"
Hermansson put her hand under her jacket, angled her gun so that it slipped out of its holster, stretched out her arm in front of the chief warden's face, recoil operation: the shot hit the middle of the rectangular cupboard door.
The bullet went straight through, hitting the back wall, and they heard it falling to the floor among the black and brown shoes.
Lennart Oscarsson didn't move. The warm cup of tea still in one hand. She pointed to the wall clock behind the desk with the muzzle of her gun.
"Eight more minutes. Do you hear? I want to know why you lied. And I want to know who Hoffmann is, why he's standing in the workshop window with a revolver to the hostage's head."
He looked at the gun, at the cupboard, at Hermansson.
"I was just lying on a… an unused bunk in Block K, searching the nice, newly painted white ceiling. Because… because I don't know who Hoffmann is. Because I don't know why he's standing there, daiming that he's going to shoot my best friend."
His voice-she wasn't quite sure whether he was going to cry, or whether it was just the fragility of having given up.
"What I do know is… is that it's about something else… that there's other people involved."
He swallowed, swallowed again.
"I was ordered to allow a lawyer to visit a client the evening before Grens was here. A prisoner in the same unit as Hoffmann. Stefan Lygas. He was one of the people who attacked him. And he was the one who… who was shot this morning. Lawyers, you might know, are often used as messengers when someone wants information to be spread inside… that's often the way it's done."
"Ordered? By whom?"
Lennart Oscarsson gave a fleeting smile.
"I was ordered to prevent Grens-or any other police officer for that matter-from getting near Hoffmann. I stood there in reception, tried to look him in the eye, explain that the prisoner he wanted to see was in the hospital unit, that he would be there for three, maybe four days more."
"By whom?"
Same smile, impotent.
"I was ordered to move Hoffmann. Back to the unit he'd come from. Even though a prisoner who's been threatened should never be moved back."
Hermansson was shouting now.
"By whom?"
The smile.
"And I was given orders, just now, that if Hoffmann demands that the gates are opened for him and the hostages… that I mustn't let him out." "Oscarsson, I have to know who-"
"I want Martin to live."
She looked at the face that wouldn't manage to hold on for much longer, then at the clock that was hanging on the wall.
Seven minutes left.
She turned around and ran out of the office, his voice following her down the corridor.
"Hermansson!"
She didn't stop.
"Hermansson!"
Words that ricocheted off the cold walls.
"Someone wants Hoffmann to die."
His legs tied. His hands tied. His mouth gagged. His head covered.
Nitroglycerine against his skin. Pentyl fuse around his chest, torso, legs.
"Setting thirty-two."
He dragged the heavy body over to the window, hit it, forced it to stand there.
"TPR three."
"Repeat."
"Transport right three."
They were close to firing. The dialogue between the marksman and the observer would carry on until they fired.
He needed more time.
Hoffmann ran across the workshop to the storeroom and the other hostage, the prison warden with the pale face.
"I want you to shout."
"The packing tape, it's cutring-"
"Shout!"
The older man was tired. He panted, his head hung to one side, as if he didn't have the strength to hold it upright.
"I don't understand."
"Shout, for fuck's sake!"
"What…?"
"What the fuck you like. There's five minutes left. Scream that." The frightened eyes looked at him.
"Shout it!"
"Five minutes left."
"Louder!"
"Five minutes left!"
"Louder!"
"Five minutes left!"
Piet Hoffmann sat still and listened: careful sounds outside the door. They had understood.
They had understood that the hostages were still alive, they wouldn't break in, not yet.
He carried on to the office and the telephone, the ringing tone, once, twice, three times, four, five, six, seven. He was holding the empty porcelain cup and threw it against the wall, shards all over the desk, the pencil holder, the same wall, she hadn't answered, she wasn't there, she…
"Object out of sight for one minute, thirty seconds."
He hadn't been visible enough.
"Repeat."
"Object out of sight for one minute, thirty seconds. Can't locate either object or hostages."
"Prepare for entry in two minutes."
Hoffmann ran out of the office and they were moving on the roof again, getting ready, finding their positions. He stopped by the window and pulled the rug toward him-the hostage had to be close and he heard him wince as the plastic cut deeper into the wounds around his ankles.
"Object in view again."
He stood still, waiting, now, abort now for Christ's sake.
`Abort. Abort preparations for entry."
He let out a slow sigh and waited, then he ran back to the office and the telephone, try again. He dialed the number, the ring tone, he couldn't bear to count them, that bloody ringing, the bloody fucking ringing, that bloody-
It stopped.
Someone had answered but didn't say anything.
The sound of a car, a car driving, the person who answered was in a car driving somewhere, and maybe, very faint, as if they were sitting farther away, it had to be, the sound of two children.
"Have you done what we agreed?"
It was difficult to hear, but he was sure, it was her.
"Yes."
He put the phone down.
Yes.
He wanted to laugh, to jump up and down, but just dialed another number.
"Central security."
"Transfer me to the gold commander."
"Gold commander?"
"Now!"
"And who the hell are you?"
"The person in one of your monitors. But, I guess for this room it's completely black."
A clicking sound, a few seconds' silence, then a voice, one that he had heard before, the one that made the decisions-he had been transferred to the church tower.
He is a dead man in three minutes.
"What do you want?"
"He is a dead man in three minutes."
"I repeat… what do you want."
"Dead."
Three minutes.
Two minutes and fifty seconds.
Two minutes and forty seconds.
Ewert Grens was standing in a church tower and felt totally alone. He was about to make a decision about whether another person should live or die. It was his responsibility. And he wasn't sure anymore if he had enough courage to do it and then live with it afterward.
The wind wasn't blowing anymore. He certainly felt nothing on his forehead and cheeks.
"Sven?"
"Yes?"
"I want to hear it again. Who he is. What he's capable of"
"There isn't anything else."
"Read it!"
Sven Sundkvist was holding the documents in his hand. There was only time for a few lines.
"Extremely antisocial personality disorder. No ability to empathize. Extensive reports, significant characteristics include impulsiveness, aggression, lack of respect for own and others' safety, lack of conscience."
Sven looked at his boss but got no answer, no contact.
"Shooting incident involving a police officer in Söderhamn, at a public space on the edge of town, he hit-"
Three Seconds Page 33
