Three Seconds (59 page)

    "With that information, I wouldn't have ordered the sniper to fire." He looked at his young colleague.

    "If I had known what I know now… Hoffmann would never have died."

     The brown plastic cup would soon be full of strong, black, bitter coffee. The machine rattled as it normally did, mostly toward the end, reluctant to give up the last drops. Chief Superintendent Göransson drank the coffee while he was out in the corridor. He saw Mariana Hermansson coming out of Grens's office, a file under her arm. He knew what their meeting had been about, they were doing exactly what they should, filing the reports required following a lethal shooting at Aspsås.

I did not participate.

    He crushed the cup, the hot liquid running down the back of his hand.

I
jumped ship.

    Göransson drank some more of the bitterness, emptied the cup. He greeted Sven Sundkvist, who was passing. He also had a couple of files under his arm, on his way to the office that Hermansson had just left, to Ewert Grens.

     He noticed the flushed cheeks, the pulsing vein by his temple.

    Sven knew Ewert Grens better than anyone else in the building, he had had to face his boss's anger and learn to deal with it, so now when the shouting and the kicking of trash cans took over he no longer saw or heard it, it had nothing to do with him. Only Ewert could chase his own demons.

    "You don't look happy."

    "Drop by Hermansson when you're done here. She'll explain. I can't face it right now."

    Sven looked at the man in the middle of the floor. They had met earlier that morning. This boiling rage hadn't been there then.

    Something had happened.

    "What do you know about Wilson?"

    "Erik?"

    "Are there any other Wilsons on the goddamn corridor?"

    Another kind of anger. Clear, tangible. Ewert could be angry about most things, a difficult, irritated anger that was such a frequent caller that it never got through. But this anger was serious, it demanded space and he tried not to downplay it.

    I must go to Hermansson afterwards.

    "I don't know him. Even though we've been here almost the same length of time. It just turned out that way. But… he seems like a nice enough guy. Why?"

    "I just heard his name today in the wrong circumstances."

    "What do you mean?"

    "We'll talk about that later too."

    Sven didn't ask anymore questions. He knew he wouldn't get any answers yet.

    "I've got the first report on Hoffmann Security AB. You interested?" "You know I am."

    He put two pieces of paper down on Ewert's desk.

    "I want you to have a look. Come over here."

    Ewert stood beside Sven.

    "A close company with annual reports and normal articles of association. I can look into that more, if you want, take a really good look at the figures."

    He pointed at the second piece of paper.

    "But this, I want you to have a look at this, right now."

    A drawing of four squares stacked on top of each other.

    "The ownership structure, Ewert. This is interesting. A board that consists of three people. Piet Hoffmann, Zofia Hoffmann, and a Polish citizen, Stanislaw Rosloniec."

A Polish citizen.

    "I've run a check on Rosloniec. He lives in Warsaw, is not registered in any international criminal intelligence databases and-now it gets really interesting-is employed by a Polish company called Wojtek Security International."

Wojtek.

    Ewert Grens searched Sven's pattern of squares but saw an airport in Denmark and a detective superintendent called Jacob Andersen.

    Eighteen days ago.

    They had sat in a meeting room at Kastrup police station and eaten greasy pastries and Andersen had spoken about a Danish informant who was supposed to buy amphetamines. In an apartment in Stockholm. With two Poles and their Swedish contact.

Swedish contact.

    "Damn it „. hang on a minute, Sven!"

    Grens pulled open one of his desk drawers and took out a CD player and the CD of the voice that Krantz had burned for him. Headphones on and three sentences he knew by heart.

A dead man. Vdstrnannagatan 79. Fourth floor.

    He removed the headphones and put them on Sven's head.

    "Listen."

    Sven Sundkvist had analyzed the recording from Emergency Services on the ninth of May at 12:37:50 as many times as Ewert.

    And now listen to this."

    The voice had been stored in one of the computer's sound files. They had both encountered it when they were waiting in a churchyard twenty-four hours ago.

"He's a dead man in three minutes."

    The one whispered
dead
and the other screamed
dead,
but when Ewert Grens and Sven Sundkvist listened carefully and compared the pronunciation of the
d
and the
e
and the
a,
it was obvious.

    It was the same voice.

    "It's him."

    "It sure as hell is him, Sven! It was Hoffmann who was in the apartment! It was Hoffmann who raised the alarm!"

    Grens was already on his way out of the room.

Wojtek is the Polish mafia.

Hoffmann Security AB is linked to Wojtek.

    The car was parked on Bergsgatan and he hurried down the stairs, even though the elevator was empty.

    So why did you raise the alarm?

    So why did you shoot another member in solitary confinement and blow a third member up?

    He turned out of Bergsgatan and drove down Hantverkargatan toward the city. He was going to visit the person whose death he was responsible for.

      He stopped the car in a bus lane outside the door to Vasagatan 42. A couple of minutes, then Nils Krantz knocked on the window. "Anything in particular?"

    "I don't know yet. It just feels right. An hour maybe, I have to think." "Here, keep them for the moment. I'll let you know if I need them." Krantz gave him a set of keys and Ewert Grens put it in the inner pocket of his jacket.

    "By the way, Ewert…"

    The forensic scientist had stopped a bit farther down the pavement.

    "I've identified the two explosives. Pentyl and nitroglycerine. It was the pentyl that caused the actual explosion, the wave that forced out the window and the heat that ignited the diesel. And the nitroglycerine had been applied directly onto someone's skin-I don't know whose yet, though."

    Grens went up the stairs of one of the many buildings in central Stockholm from the turn of the century, the first few years of the 1900s when the cityscape changed dramatically.

    He stopped in front of a door on the first floor.

    Hoffmann Security AB. Same old trick. A security firm as a front for the Eastern European mafia.

    He opened the door with the keys that he'd got from Krantz.

    A beautiful apartment, shining parquet floor, high ceilings, white walls. He looked out of the window with a view of Kungsbron and the Vasa theatre, an elderly couple on their way in to the evening performance, as he had often thought of doing himself, but never gotten around to.

You were sent up for a drug crime. But you weren't an amphetamine dealer.
He walked down the hall and went into what must once have been the drawing room, but was now an office with two gun cabinets by an open fireplace.

You had links with Wojtek. But you were not a member of the mafia.

    He sat down in the chair by the desk that he guessed Hoffmann must have sat in.

You were someone else.

    He got up again and wandered around the apartment, looked in the two empty gun cabinets, touched the deactivated alarm, rinsed out some dirty glasses.

Who?

     When he left Hoffmann Security AB, Grens had gone to look at the storage spaces that belonged to the apartment. He had opened a storeroom in the cellar with a strong smell of damp, and he had walked around in the loft with a fan heater whirring above his head while he looked for a storeroom that was more or less empty, except for a hammer and chisel that were lying on top of a pile of old tires.

    It was late, and he should perhaps have driven the kilometer from the door on Vasagatan to his own flat on Sveavägen, but the anger and restlessness pushed back the tiredness-he wouldn't sleep tonight either.

    The corridor of the homicide unit was waiting, abandoned. His colleagues would rather spend the first summer evenings with a glass of wine at one of the outside cafes on Kungsholmen followed by a slow walk home, than with twenty-four parallel investigations and unpaid overtime in a characterless office. He didn't feel left out, didn't miss it. He had chosen long ago not to take part and your own choice can never become ugly loneliness. This evening it would be a report on a shooting in a prison and tomorrow evening it would be a report on another shooting. There was always an investigation that was a trauma for the person who was shot, bat for the investigator generated a vicarious sense of belonging. Grens was almost at the coffee machine and two plastic cups of blackness when he stopped by his pigeonhole and saw a large padded envelope in the pile of unopened letters; too many damn reference lists and soulless mass mailings. He pulled it out and weighed it in his hand-not particularly heavy-turned it over without seeing any sender. His name and address were easy to read, a man's handwriting, he was sure of that, something square, unrhythmical, almost sharp about it, possibly in felt pen.

    Ewert Grens put the envelope down in the middle of the desk and stared at it while he emptied the first cup. Sometimes you just get a feeling, impossible to explain. He opened a drawer and a bag with unused rubber gloves, put on a pair and opened the end of the envelope with his index finger. He peeped cautiously in. No letter, no accompanying text or paper.

    He counted five things, took them out one at a time and placed them in a row in front of him, between the files of ongoing investigations.

    Half a plastic cup of coffee more.

    He started from the left. Three passports. Red with gold letters. EUROPEAN UNION, SWEDEN, PASSPORT. All Swedish, genuine, issued by the police authority in Stockholm.

    The photographs had been taken in a normal photo booth.

    A few centimeters in size, black and white, slightly blurred, small reflections in the shining eyes.

    The same face three times. Different names, different ID numbers. The face of a dead person.

    Pier Hoffmann.

    Grens leaned back in his chair and looked over at the window and the light outside, dim street lights that guarded the straight, empty asphalt paths of the inner courtyard at Kronoberg.

If this is you.

    He picked up the envelope, turned it around.

If this has come from you.

    He held it closer, fingertips brushed lightly over the front. There were no stamps. But there was something that looked like a postmark in the top right-hand corner. He studied it for a long time. Difficult to read, half the letters had disappeared. FRANKFURT. He was more or less certain. And six numbers. 234212. Then a kind of symbol, maybe a bird, or a plane.

    The rest was mainly streaks that had seen too much water.

    Grens scoured his desk drawer and the telephone list that he found there in a plastic sleeve. Horst Bauer, Bundeskriminalamt, Wiesbaden. He liked the German detective superintendent with whom he had worked a few years ago on an investigation in connection with a busload of abandoned Romanian children. Bauer was at home and having dinner, but was friendly and helpful and while Ewert waited and his food got cold, made three phone calls to confirm that the envelope that had recently arrived in a pigeonhole at the City Police in Stockholm had probably been sent by a courier company with offices at Frankfurt am Main International Airport.

    Grens thanked him and hung up.

    One of the world's largest airports.

    He gave a deep sigh.

If it's you. If this comes from you. You instructed someone to send it for you. After your death.

    Two more objects on the desk. The first wasn't even a centimeter big. He held it in his clumsy rubber fingers. A receiver, a silver earpiece, electronic devices for listening to conversations that were caught by transmitters of the same size.