Three Seconds

by Anders Roslund

  He has never used my first name before.

  I don't want him to do it ever again.

  "The snitch?"

  "The snitch. The informant. The covert human intelligence source. A criminal who commits crimes that we then overlook because he's helping us to deal with other crimes."

  Ågestam had been holding the cup in front of his mouth throughout the whole conversation. He put it down now.

  "Whose laptop?"

  "You don't want to know."

  "Whose?"

  "The county police commissioner."

  Lars Ågestam got up from the table, disappeared out of the kitchen and up the stairs with hurried steps.

  Ewert Grens watched him.

  I've got more.

  Västmannagatan 79.

  You'll get that as well. When we wrap all this up. In the next twenty-four hours.

  Hurried steps down again. The prosecutor had a printer in his arms, linked it up to the laptop-they listened to three hundred two paper copies forming a pile, one at a time.

  "You'll give it back?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you need help?"

  "No."

  "Sure?"

  "The door's unlocked."

  The sun had taken over the kitchen, the light which had a short while ago been aided by bright bulbs was now strong enough to stand alone and he didn't notice when Ågestam switched off the lights.

  It was half past four, but the day had dawned.

  "Lars:"

  She was young and her hair was tangled. She had on a white robe and white slippers and she was very tired.

  "I'm sorry. Did we wake you?"

  "Why aren't you asleep?"

  "This is Ewert Grens and-"

  "I know who it is."

  "I'll be up in a while. We just need to finish up here."

  She sighed, she didn't weigh much, but her steps were heavier than even Grens's as she went back upstairs to the bedroom.

  "Sorry, Ågestam."

  "She'll go back to sleep."

  "She's still upset, isn't she?"

  "She believes you made an error of judgment. I do too."

  "I apologized. Christ alive, it was five years ago now!"

  "Grens?"

  "Yes?"

  "You're shouting again. Don't wake the children."

  Lars Ågestam emptied both cups into the sink, the stuff that was viscous and bitter and stuck to the bottom of the cup.

  "I don't need anymore tea."

  He picked up the pile of three hundred two newly printed pages. "Doesn't matter what time it is. This… I'm not tired anymore, Grens, I'm… angry. If i need anything it's to calm down."

  He opened one of the cupboards. On the top shelf, a bottle of Seagram's and suitably sized glasses.

  "What do you think, Grens?"

  Ågestam filled two glasses to the halfway mark.

  "It's half past four in the morning."

  "That's the way it goes, sometimes."

  Another person.

  Ewert Grens gave a weak smile as Ågestam downed half of it.

  If he had had to guess, he would have guessed teetotaller ten out of ten times. Grens had a sip himself after a while. It was milder in taste than he had imagined, perfect for a kitchen, with pajamas and a robe.

  "The truth we were never told, Ågestam."

  He put a hand on the pile of papers.

  "I'm not sitting here because I enjoy watching you wake up. And not for your tea, either, not even the whisky. I came here because I'm certain that we can resolve this together."

  Lars Ågestam flicked through the secret intelligence reports that he had not known existed until now.

  His neck was still red.

  He still kept running his hands back and forth through his hair. "Three hundred and two."

  He paused every now and then, read something, then continued leafing through, arbitrarily choosing which document to read next.

  "Two versions. One official. And one for police management."

  He waved at the pile in front of him and poured another glass of whisky.

  "Do you realize, Grens? I could prosecute them all. I could prosecute every single police officer who has anything to do with this. For forging documents. For fake certificates. For provoking crimes. There's enough here to merit a separate police unit at Aspsås."

  He downed the glass and laughed.

  "And all these trials? What do you think, Grens? All these pleadings and interviews and judgments without the knowledge that the heads of the police authority were already party to!"

  He threw the pile down on the table. Some pages fell on the floor; he stood up and stamped on them.

  "You've just woken the children."

  They hadn't heard her coming-she stood in the doorway, in the white robe but without the slippers.

  "Lars, you've got to calm down."

  "I can't."

  "You're frightening them."

  Ågestam kissed her on both cheeks. He was already on his way to the children's room.

  "Grens?"

  He turned on the bottom step of the stairs.

  "I'm going to spend the whole day on this."

  "Monday morning. Or two tapes will be missing."

  "I'll get back to you by this evening at the latest."

  "Monday morning. Then the wrong people will be finding out how damn close I am."

  "By tonight at the latest. That's the best I can do. Is that okay?" "That's okay."

  The prosecutor paused, laughed again.

  "Grens, imagine! A separate police unit. A separate police unit at Aspsås!"

  The coffee tasted different.

  He had poured out the first cup after a couple of mouthfuls. A fresh one from the machine in the corridor had tasted the same. He was holding the third in his hand when he realized why.

  It was like a film on his palate.

  He had started the day with two whiskies in Ågestam's kitchen. He didn't normally do that. He didn't generally drink much spirits, it was years since he'd stopped drinking on his own.

  Ewert Grens sat at his desk and felt strangely empty.

  The First early birds had already come and passed his open door, but hadn't annoyed him, not even those who had tried to stop and say good morning.

  He had released his anger.

  He had driven from Ågestam, a few newspaper delivery boys, the odd cyclist, that was all-a city that was at its weariest just before five.

  There had been plenty of room for guilt. The guilt that others had tried to lay on him. He had raged against it, tried to silence it when it sat beside him, chased it into the back seat. It had continued to nag him, forcing him to drive faster. He had been on his way to Göransson to offload it, then managed to control himself-he would confront them, but not yet, soon. He would meet the people who were truly responsible very soon. He had parked in Bergsgatan by the entrance to the police headquarters but had not gone directly to his office, he had taken the elevator up to Kronoberg remand and then on up to the roof and eight long, narrow cages. One hour of fresh air every day and twenty meters to move in, then jail. He had ordered the wardens on duty to call in two prisoners who, in ill-fitting prison clothes and separate cages, were standing looking out over the city and freedom, and then to leave their posts and go down two floors for an early morning coffee. Grens had waited until he was completely alone and then gone out into one of the small yards. He had looked at the sky through the criss-cross of bars and he had screamed, high above the sleeping buildings in the Stockholm dawn. For fifteen minutes he had held the stolen laptop with another reality in his hands and screamed louder than ever before, he had released his fury and it raced over the rooftops and evaporated somewhere above Vasastan, leaving him extremely hoarse, tired, almost spent.

  The coffee still tasted odd. He put it to one side and sat down on the corduroy sofa, lay down after a while, closed his eyes while he searched for a face in the window of a prison workshop.

  I don't ge
t it.

  Someone who chooses a life where each day is a potential death sentence. For the excitement? For some kind of romantic spy nonsense? For personal morals?

  I'm not convinced. That sort of thing just sounds good.

  For the money?

  Ten thousand crappy kronor a month paid from reward money in order to avoid formal payrolls and to protect your identity?

  Hardly.

  Grens straightened the fabric on the arm of the sofa that was slightly too high; it was chafing his neck and made it difficult to relax.

  I just don't get it.

  You could commit whatever goddamn crime you wanted, you were outside the law, but only for as long as you were useful, until you became someone who could be spared.

  You were an outlaw.

  You knew it. You knew that's how it worked.

  You had everything that I don't have, you had a wife, children, a home, you had something to lose.

  And still you chose it.

  I don't get it.

  His neck was stiff. The slightly too-high sofa arm.

  He had fallen asleep.

  The face in the window of a prison workshop had disappeared, sleep had taken over; the kind that came after rage that was soft and had rocked him gently for nearly seven hours. He might have woken up once, he wasn't sure, but it felt like that, like the telephone had rung, like Sven had said that he was sitting in an airport outside New York waiting for the next flight to Jacksonville, that the sound file was interesting and that he had prepared himself on the plane, for a meeting with Wilson.

  It was a long time since Ewert Grens had slept so well.

  Despite the bright sunlight in the room, despite all the damnable noise.

  He stretched. His back was as sore as it usually was after sleeping on the narrow sofa, his stiff leg ached when it reached the floor. He was slowly falling to bits, one day at a time. Fifty-nine-year-old men who exercised too little and ate too much generally did.

  A cold shower in the changing room that he seldom used, two cinnamon buns and a bottle of banana-flavored drinking yogurt from the vending machine.

  "Ewert?"

  "Yes?"

  "Is that your lunch?"

  Hermansson had come out of her office farther down the corridor, she had heard him, the limping, it was just Grens lumbering around. "Breakfast, lunch, I don't know. Did you want something?"

  She shook her head, they walked slowly, side by side.

  "This morning, early… Ewert, was it your voice?"

  "You live here in Kungsholmen?"

  "Yes."

  "Nearby?"

  "I don't have far to go."

  Grens nodded.

  "Then it was probably me you heard."

  "Where?"

  "Up in the remand yards on the roof You get a good view from up there."

  "I heard. And so did the rest of Stockholm."

  Ewert Grens looked at her, smiled, something he didn't do often.

  "It was a choice between that and firing a bullet through a wardrobe door. I understand that some prefer the latter."

  They had come to his door. He stopped. It felt like she was going to come in.

  "Did you want something, Hermansson?"

  "Zofia Hoffmann."

  "Yes?"

  "I'm not getting anywhere. She's disappeared."

  The banana-flavored yogurt was finished. He should have bought one more.

  "I've checked with her work again. She hasn't been in touch since the hostage drama. The children's nursery, same story."

  Mariana Hermansson tried to peer into his office. Grens closed the door a bit more. He didn't know why, she had come there several times a day since he employed her three years ago. But he had just been asleep there, nearly seven hours on the sofa-it was as if he didn't want her to know that.

  "I've located her closest family. Not many of them. Her parents, an aunt, two uncles. All in the Stockholm area. She isn't there. The kids aren't there."

  She looked at him.

  "I've spoken to the three women who are described as her best friends. With neighbors, with a gardener who works for the family for a couple of hours every now and then, with several members of a choir where she sings a couple of times a week, with the oldest son's football coach and the youngest son's gymnastics teacher."

  She shrugged.

  "No one has seen them."

  Hermansson waited for a response. She didn't get one.

  "I've checked the hospitals, hotels, hostels. They aren't anywhere, Ewert. Zofia and the two boys, they can't be found anywhere."

  Ewert Grens nodded.

  "Wait here. I want to show you something."

  He opened the door, closed it behind him, careful that she shouldn't see in or follow him.

  You came to Aspsås prison as Wojtek's contact man in Sweden.

  You were there to knock out the competition for them and then establish Wojtek and expand.

  One single moment and you were someone else.

  One single meeting with a lawyer, a messenger, and they knew who you really were.

  You called her. You warned her.

  Grens lifted up a padded envelope that was lying on his desk and was now emptied of three passports, a receiver, and a CD with a secret recording. He went back out to the corridor and Hermansson with it under his arm.

  "She received two short phone calls from Hoffmann. We don't know what they were about and we haven't found anything to indicate that she was involved in any way. We have no reasonable grounds to suspect her of anything whatsoever."

  Grens held up the envelope so that Hermansson could see it.

  "We can't issue a warrant for her arrest abroad. Even though that is where she is."

  He pointed at the postmark.

  "I'm convinced that it was Zofia Hoffmann who sent this. Frankfurt am Main International Airport. Two hundred and sixty-five destinations, fourteen hundred flights, one hundred and fifty thousand passengers. Every day."

  He started to head for the vending machine-he needed another yogurt, another cinnamon bun.

  "She's well gone, Hermansson. And she knows. She knows that we have no grounds to get her or even look for her."

  The sun was high.

  It had been warm since early morning. He had fought with the damp sheets and a pillow drowned in sweat from his hairline, the temperature rising a couple of degrees every hour until now, just before lunch. The heat and the sharp light forced him to stop abruptly in front of the great gate until what was double had disappeared.

  Erik Wilson sat quietly in the front seat of the rented car.

  He had been here for five days, back in Glynco, Georgia, at a military base called FLETC, to continue the work that had been interrupted when Paula rang about a buyer in Västmannagatan who had paid with a Polish bullet to the head.

  He started the car again, rolled slowly through the gate and past the guard who saluted. Three more weeks. Cooperation between the Swedish and European police and American police organizations was essential for the farther development of their CHIS work, and this was where they had the strongest tradition and knowledge, and as Paula was out of contact while he worked behind the walls of Aspsås, it was the perfect time to finish the course he had started in advanced infiltration.

  The heat was incredible.

  He still hadn't gotten used to it-normally it was easier, less invasive. At least that's what he remembered from previous visits.

  Maybe it was the climate that had changed. Maybe it was he who had gotten older.

  He liked driving along the wide, straight roads in this great country that was built around traffic. He accelerated when he reached the 1-95, sixty kilometers to Jacksonville and the other side of the state boundary, half an hour on a day like today.

  He had been woken by the phone call.

  It was still dawn, sharp sunlight and the birds with their piercing song had come alive outside his window.

  Sven Sundkvist had been sitting in a bar
eating breakfast at Newark Liberty International Airport.

  He had explained that he would continue his journey in a few hours.

  He said that he was on his way south because he needed immediate assistance with an investigation.

  Erik Wilson had asked what it was about-they seldom talked to each other when they met in the corridors of the police headquarters in Kungsholmen, why should they do so here, seven thousand kilometers away? Sundkvist hadn't answered, and instead had repeatedly asked when and where until Wilson had suggested the only lunch restaurant that he knew, somewhere where you could sit without being seen, without being heard.

  It was a pleasant place on the corner of San Marco Boulevard and Philips Street, quiet in spite of every table being taken and dark in spite of the sun blasting on the roofs, walls, and windows. Sven Sundkvist looked around. Men dressed in suits and ties who glanced at each other on the sly as they gave their best arguments accompanied by grilled fish; negotiations that involved European wine and mobile phones on the white tablecloth. Waiters who were invisible, but were by the table the moment a plate was empty or a napkin fell to the floor. The smell of food blended with candles and the scent of red and yellow roses.

  He had been traveling for seventeen hours. Ewert had phoned just as Anita had turned off the light and snuggled up to him, her soft shoulder and breasts against his back, the first deep breaths on his neck as thoughts slowly evaporated and could not be caught no matter how hard he tried. Anita had avoided saying anything when he packed his bag and avoided looking at him when he tried to catch her eye. He understood her. Ewert Grens had for so long been part of their bedroom, someone who lived in his own time bubble and therefore didn't realize that others had their own too. Sven didn't have the strength to talk to him about it, to put down limits, but understood that Anita had to do just that sometimes in order to cope.

  The taxi from the airport was one of the ones without air conditioning and the heat had been as unexpected as it was forceful. He had traveled in clothes made for the Swedish spring and landed in a place near Florida's beaches with full summer heat. He walked toward the entrance of the restaurant and drank some mineral water that tasted of chemical additives. They had had offices on the same corridor for ten years and had worked together on several investigations, but all the same, he didn't know him. Erik Wilson was not someone you went out and had a beer with or maybe it was Sven you didn't do that with, or maybe they were just too different. Sven, who loved his life in a terraced house with Anita and Jonas, Wilson who scorned it. Now they were going to meet, tolerate each other, one asking for information and one with no intention of giving it.