Three Seconds (17 page)

    The deputy CEO was still sitting at the same table, a new half glass of orange juice in front of him.

    Hoffmann waited by the long reception desk while Henryk sat down next to Wojtek's number two.

Clear bluish fluid.

Eighty-one kilos of cut amphetamine.

    The deputy CEO turned around and nodded. Piet Hoffmann felt something relax in the pit of his stomach as he walked across the expensive hotel lobby.

    "All those bloody bits. They just get stuck to your teeth."

    The deputy CEO pointed to his half-empty glass of juice and ordered two more. The waitress was young and smiled at them, just as she smiled at all the guests who gave her a hundred-kronor tip and might well order again.

    "I will be leading the operation on the outside. You're leading inside, from Kumla, Hall or Aspsås. Maximum security Swedish prisons."

    "I need a coffee."

    A double espresso. The young waitress smiled again.

    "It was a long night."

    He looked at the deputy CEO, who paused.

    It could be a demonstration of power. Maybe it was.

    "Nights sometimes are. Long."

    The deputy CEO smiled. He wasn't looking for respect. He was looking for a strength he could trust.

    "Right now we've got four people in Aspsås, and three in both Hall and Kumla. In different sections, but they're able to communicate. I want you to be arrested within the week for a crime that is serious enough to merit a sentence in one of them."

    "Two months. Then I'm done."

    "You'll be given all the time you need."

    "I don't want more. But I do want a guarantee. That you'll get me out at exactly that point."

    "Don't worry."

    "A guarantee."

    "We'll get you out."

    "How?"

    "We'll look after your family when you're inside. And when you're done, we'll look after you. New life, new identity, money to start over again."

    The lobby of the Sheraton was still empty.

    Those who had come to the capital on business wouldn't check in until the evening. Those who had come in search of museums and monuments were already out and about with a fast-talking guide and new Nike trainers.

    He had finished his coffee. He motioned to the reception, another double espresso and one of those little mint wafers.

    "Three kilos."

    The deputy CEO put his glass of juice down next to the others. He was listening.

    "I'll be caught with three kilos. I'll be questioned and plead guilty. I'll explain that I'm working on my own, so I get a short remand as charges can be brought immediately. I'll be given a substantial sentence by the city court-three kilos of amphetamine is a priority crime in Swedish courts, and say that I accept the sentence, so I won't have to wait until it enters into force. If everything goes smoothly, I should be behind bars in the right institution within two weeks."

    Piet Hoffmann was sitting in a hotel lobby in the center of Stockholm, but was in fact looking around the small cell in Österåker prison from ten years ago.

    Hideous days when voices screamed
urine test
and grown men lined up to stand in the mirrored room where gimlet eyes inspected their penises and urine. Horrendous nights with spot inspections, standing barely awake in your underpants outside the cell door while a gang of screws stripped, smashed, and emptied everything and when they were done, just walked away from the chaos.

    He would deal with it this time. He was there for reasons greater than the humiliation.

    "When you're in place, there'll be two stages to the operation. In exactly the same way that we took one prison after the other in Norway from Oslo prison, or in Finland from Riihimaki, which was the first."

    The deputy CEO leaned forward.

    "You'll knock out any competition that's already there. Then we'll deliver our products through our own channels. To begin with, the remaining seventy-eight kilos that Henryk just approved: you'll use that to dump prices. Everyone inside has to learn that we are the dealers. Amphetamine for fifty kronor a gram instead of three hundred. Until we've got it all. Then we'll raise it. Fuck, maybe we'll do more than that.
Keep buying.
We'll bump it up to five hundred, why not six hundred per gram.
Or stop injecting."

    Piet Hoffmann was back in the cramped cell in Österåker. Where drugs ruled. Where those who
owned
the drugs ruled. Amphetamine. Heroin. Even bread and rotten apples left for three weeks in a bucket of water in a cleaning cupboard-the minute they changed into twelve percent moonshine, it was the owner of the cleaning bucket who ruled.

    "I need three days to knock out the competition. During that time I don't want to have any contact and it's my responsibility to take in enough gear."

    "Three days."

    "From day four, I want one kilo of amphetamine to be delivered once a week through Wojtek's channels. It's my job to see that it's used. I don't want anyone hiding or storing anything, nothing that resembles competition."

    Hotel lobbies are strange places.

    No one belongs there. No one has any intention of staying there.

    The two tables closest to them, which had been empty until now, were suddenly transformed into two groups of Japanese tourists who sat down to wait patiently for the rooms they had booked, which weren't ready yet.

    The deputy CEO lowered his voice.

    "How will you get it in?"

    "That's my responsibility."

    "I want to know how you're going to do it."

    "The same way that I did at Österåker ten years ago. The same way that I've done it several times since in other prisons."

    "How?"

    "With all due respect, you know that I'm capable, that I'll take responsibility for it, and that should be enough."

    "Hoffmann,
how?"

    Piet Hoffmann smiled-it felt unnatural-for the first time since last night.

    "Tulips and poetry."

    The door wasn
^'
t properly shut.

    He distinctly heard footsteps out in the corridor, and they were hurrying toward him.

    He didn't want any visitors right now He wasn't going to share this with anyone.

    Erik Wilson got up from his chair and checked the door handle. It
was
already closed. He had imagined it, the steps scraping on the floor, getting louder and louder, were not there. He was more anxious, more stressed than he realized.

    Two meetings in a matter of hours.

    The longer one at number five with Paula's version of the murder in Västmannagatan and his report from the meeting in Warsaw, and the considerably shorter one at number four when a plastic bag containing a bloody shirt changed hands.

    Wilson looked over at the locked cupboard by the wall on the other side of the room.

    It was in there. A murderer's battledress.

    It wouldn't stay there much longer.

    The steps out in the corridor had disappeared, as had the ones in his head. He looked at the computer screen.

    Name Piet
Hoffmann

    Personal ID number
721018-002.0
Number of hits 75

    His most important tool over the past nine years for developing the best infiltrator he'd ever heard of.

    ASPEN, the criminal intelligence database.

    He had started as soon as Piet was released from Österåker, his first day of freedom and first day as a newly recruited infiltrator. Erik Wilson had himself met him at the gate, driven him the fifty kilometers to Stockholm in his own car and when he had dropped him off, he carried on straight to the police headquarters and recorded the first observation of 721018-0010 in ASPEN, intelligence that from that moment would be available to every police officer who logged on to find out more about Piet Hoffmann. A concise, but accurate account of how, on his release, the suspect was met at the gates of Österåker by a car and two previous convicts and known criminals with confirmed links to the Yugoslavian mafia.

    Over the years he had successively made him more dangerous
observed near the property that was raided in connection with suspected arms dealing
and more violent
observed fifteen minutes before the murder in Ostling in the company of the suspect, Markovi?
and more ruthless. Wilson had varied his formulations and the degree of misinformation, and with each new observation had added to the myth of Piet Hoffmann's potency until, according to a database on a computer, he was one of the most dangerous criminals in Sweden.

    He listened again. More footsteps out in the corridor. The sound got clearer, louder, until they passed his door and slowly disappeared again.

    He tilted the screen up.

KNOWN.

     In two weeks' time, Piet would be given a long prison sentence and then take over enough power to control the drug supply, the kind of force that was treated with respect inside.

DANGEROUS.

    Which was why Erik Wilson now wrote this in capital letters.

ARMED.

    The next colleague to check Piet Hoffmann in the database would now be presented with a special page and a special code that was only used for a handful of criminals.

KNOWN DANGEROUS ARMED

    Any patrol with access to this truth, which was their own intelligence after all, would know him to be extremely dangerous and confront him as such, and this reputation would then accompany him in the secure transport that would transfer him from custody to prison.

      He held the mobile phone to his ear. According to the automatic voice that spoke every ten seconds, it was exactly half past twelve when the dark door with HOLM on the letter box opened from inside and Piet Hoffmann walked into a plastic-sheeted flat on the second floor. The parquet floor was uneven and creaked, probably due to water damage.

    Number two.

    Högalidsgatan 38 and Heleneborgsgaran 9.

    Erik Wilson had made some instant coffee, as he usually did, and as normal, Hoffmann did not drink it. A soft sofa in what must have been the TV room, transparent plastic sheeting to protect the fabric during the two-month renovation that rustled when they moved and after a while clung to the film of sweat on his back.

    "We'll use this."

    Piet Hoffmann knew that they didn't have much time.

    He could see it in Erik's eyes, for the first time, as they darted around the room, restless and unfocused. The man who had been his contact for nine years and who had never laughed or cried was stressed, and therefore doing what stressed people often do, trying to hide it, thus making it all the more obvious.