Three Seconds (35 page)

    Piet Hoffmann pressed his back against the wall. An anxious glance at the pillow under the covers and the chair in the threshold and the sock between the door and its frame. His protection, exactly the same as yesterday and as tomorrow, two and a half seconds if anyone knew and attacked at the only time of day when the guards couldn't see or hear.

    One minute past seven. Nineteen minutes left. Then he would go out, have a shower, and eat breakfast with the others.

    He had taken the first step. He had felled the three main dealers in Aspsås prison with forty-two grams of 30 percent manufactured amphetamine. Warsaw and the deputy CEO had already received the reports they needed and opened a bottle of 2ubrOwka, raised a glass to the next stage.

    Eight minutes left.

    His breathing was measured, every muscle tensed, death didn't come knocking.

    Today he was going to take the next step. For Wojtek, the first grams to the first customers and the rumor that there was a new supplier in one of Sweden's hardest prisons. For the Swedish police, more information about supplies, delivery dates, and distribution channels until the operation had been built up enough for it to be destroyed-days or weeks waiting for the moment when the organization had full control but hadn't yet expanded to the next prison, when an informant's knowledge was sufficient to reach the very heart of the organization back in a black building on ul. Ludwika Idzikowskiego in Warsaw.

    Hoffmann looked at the alarm clock that was ticking too loud. Twenty past seven. He moved the chair, made his bed and after a while opened the door to a sleepy corridor. Stefan and Karol Tomasz smiled at him as he passed the kitchen and breakfast table. The prison bus usually came with any new prisoners around this time and it was obvious that someone who was called the Greek was now sitting on one of the evil-smelling seats with a couple of guys from Block H opposite him and presumably they weren't saying much to each other as they looked out of the windows and tried to understand what the fuck had actually happened.

    He had a hot shower, washing away the tension of twenty minutes behind a cell door ready to fight and flee. He looked in the part of the mirror that wasn't steamed up yet at someone who was unshaven and whose hair was a bit too long-leave the razor in his pocket, the salt and pepper stubble would stay where it was today.

    The cleaning cart was in a cupboard just outside the main door to the unit.

    A metal frame with a black garbage bag, hard rolls of considerably smaller white trash bags, a small brush with a wobbly dustpan, a smelly plastic bucket, small bits of material that he assumed were used for washing the windows, and at the bottom some unperfumed detergent that he had never seen before.

    "Hoffmann."

    The principal prison officer with piercing eyes was sitting in the aquarium with the wardens when he passed the big glass panes.

    "First day?"

    "First day."

    "You have to wait at every locked door. Look up at every camera. And if and when central security decides to let you through, you do it as fast as possible in the few seconds that it's open."

    "Anything else?"

    "I looked through your papers yesterday. You've got… now, what was it?… ten years. I don't know, Hoffmann, but with a bit of luck that should be enough time for you to learn how to clean properly."

    The first locked door was at the start of the underground passage. He stopped the cart, looked up at the camera, waited for the clicking sound and then went on through. The air was damp and he felt chilled as he walked under the prison yard; he had been escorted through a similar passage several times in the year he was at Österåker: to the hospital unit, or the gym, or the kiosk where every kronor earned could be exchanged for shaving cream and soap. He stopped in front of each door, nodded at the watchful cameras and then hurried through while the door was open-he wanted to attract as little attention as possible.

    "Hey you!"

    He had nodded at a group of prisoners from the other side of the prison on their way to their various workplaces when one of them turned around, looked at him.

    "Yeah?"

    A druggie. Skinny as hell, evasive eyes, feet that found it hard to stand still.

    "I heard- I want to buy. Eight g."

    Stefan and Karol Tomasz had done a good job.

    A big prison is a small place when messages pass through walls. "Two."

    "Two?"

    "You can get two. This afternoon. In the blind spot."

    "Two? Fuck, I need at least-"

    "That's all you'll get. This time around."

    The skinny prick was waving his long arms when Hoffmann turned his back and carried on down the wide passage.

    He would stand there. His body shaking, counting the minutes until he

    got that feeling that made this all bearable. He would buy his two g and he

    would inject them with a dirty syringe in the first available toilet.

    Piet Hoffmann walked away slowly and tried not to laugh.

    Only a few hours to go.

    Then he would have taken over all drug dealing in Aspsås prison.

     The lights in the homicide corridor were strong and flickered every now and then. An irritating brightness that blinded you, combined with a jarring, whirring sound every time they flickered. The two strip lights by the vending machines were worst. Fredrik Göransson could still feel the dread of yesterday in his body; it had taken him all afternoon and evening, a night's sleep and some time after he had woken to realize that the visit from Grens had sparked a gnawing, consuming feeling that would not go away, no matter how hard he tried. Prioritizing infiltration inside prison walls over and above a murder investigation was not a good solution. He had sat at the table in Rosenbad and weighed it against control over the Polish mafia and had chosen to restrict criminal expansion.

    "Göransson."

That bloody voice.

    "I want to talk to you, Göransson."

He had never liked it.

    "Morning, Ewert."

    Ewert Grens limped more noticeably now-either that or the corridor walls just amplified the hard sound of a healthy leg meeting a concrete floor.

    "The firearms register."

Whatever it is that takes up so much room.

    Fredrik Göransson avoided the heavy hands that fumbled for plastic cups and the coffee machine buttons beside him.

There's no room here again.

    "You're standing too close."

    "I'm not going to move again."

    "If you want an answer, you're going to have to."

    Ewert Grens stayed where he was.

    "721018-0010. Three Radom pistols and four hunting rifles."
The name that was still blinking on his screen.

    "Yes, what about it?"

    "I want to know how someone with his criminal record was granted a firearms license for work."

    "I'm not sure what you're getting at."

    "Assaulting a police officer. Attempted murder."

    The plastic cup was full. Grens tasted the warm liquid, gave a satisfied nod and pressed the button for another.

    "I don't get it, Göransson."

I get it, Grens.

He has a firearms license because he is not violent and is not a classified psychopath and does not need to be branded dangerous and has not been convicted of attempted murder.

Because the database entries that you've seen are a tool, fake.

"I'll
look into it. If it's important."

    Grens tested the second cup, looked just as happy and started to walk away, slowly.

    "It
is
important. I want to know who issued that license. And why."
It was me.

    "I'll do what I can."

    "I need it today. He's in for questioning first thing tomorrow morning." Chief Superintendent Göransson stood where he was under the flickering, whirring light as Grens walked away.

    He shouted after the detective who had demanded answers.

    "And the others?"

    Grens stopped without turning round.

    "Which others?"

    "You had three names when you came to me yesterday."

    "I'm dealing with those two today. This bastard is doing time already, so I know where I've got him, he'll be there tomorrow too."

Too close.

    The ungainly body carrying a plastic cup in each hand limped off down the corridor and disappeared into an office.

Grens had been standing too close.

     The toilet bowl was yellow from piss and the sink was full of wet tobacco and cigarette butts with no filter. The unscented detergent didn't even remove the top layer of dirt. He scrubbed for a long time with the brush and then with the scouring cloth, but they only slid over the worn porcelain surface. The toilet outside the door to the workshop was small and used by people who pissed outside the bowl in the short breaks they could get from the work they hated, a couple of minutes' respite from a punishment that was never clearer than when you were standing by a machine that drilled small holes for screws at the bottom of a lamppost hatch.

    Piet Hoffmann went into the big room and greeted the same faces that he had the day before. He wiped over all the workbenches and shelves, washed the floor around the diesel barrel, emptied the bins, cleaned the large window that faced the church. Every now and then he'd glance over at the small office behind the glass wall and the two guards sitting there. He was waiting for them to get up and do their round of the workshop, which they had to do every half an hour.

    "Is it you?"

    He was big, hair in a long ponytail and a beard that made him look much older than his-Hoffmann guessed-twenty years.

    "Yes."

    He was working on the press, big hands holding metal that would be shaped into rectangular hatches-he could do a couple a minute if he didn't stop to look out the window.

    "One g. For today. Every day."

    This afternoon."

    "Block H."

    "We've got a man there."

    "Michal?"

    "Yes. You get it off him and pay him."

    Hoffmann took his time. He wiped and scrubbed for an hour or more-it was a good way of getting to know the room and working out the distance from the window to the pillars and noting the position of all the surveillance cameras, to know more than everyone else, to be able to control every situation, the difference between life and death. The guards got up from their chairs and left the office and he hurried in with his cart to wipe over an empty desk and an equally empty can, careful to stand with his back to the glass wall and workshop the whole time. He only needed a couple of seconds, the razorblade was in his pocket and he switched it to the top drawer of the desk in an empty space between the pens and paperclips. A new bag in the can, still with his back to the glass, then he went out, took the elevator down to the passage with four locked doors to the administration block.

     His body felt itchy and his suit was too tight over the chest. He loosened his tie a touch and ran even faster down the corridor and through the door into the larger building that had swallowed the surrounding buildings and now constituted the greater part of a block dedicated to police operations.

    Fredrik Göransson had sweat on his cheeks, neck, back.

    Piet Hoffmann. Paula.

    Ewert Grens was on his way there, to Aspsås prison, had already booked the time and room. He would only have to question Hoffmann for a couple of minutes, no more, before Hoffmann would lean over the table, ask Grens to switch off the recorder and then burst out laughing and explain that you can go home now, we're working for the same side, for Christ's sake, I'm here working for one of your colleagues and it was your bosses, in that room in the Government Offices, who chose to overlook an execution in a flat in the center so that I could carry on my infiltration here, on the inside.

    Göransson stepped out from the lift and into a room without knocking on the door and without any consideration to the hand that was holding a telephone receiver and the arm than waved that he should wait outside until the call was finished. He sank down into one of the sofas and tugged absent mindedly at his increasingly red throat. The national police commissioner asked if he could call the person on the other end of the phone back and finished the conversation, looking at a person who was a stranger to him.

    "Ewert Grens."

    His forehead was moist and his eyes were darting around.