He ran his finger up and down the window’s wooden frame.
“This is synthetic putty. Still a little damp. It usually takes two days to dry. Almost as long as Zaravic has been locked up. Someone was here—someone who knew we were coming.”
They both heard Mariana dismantling the washbasin in the toilet in the hall.
“The police leak, Sven.”
“Whoever switched sides is still delivering information to whomever we’re investigating.”
“Don’t say that, Sven. Don’t think it.”
“I don’t need to.”
He pointed to the wooden frame again. This time not to the putty, but to some stains next to it.
“It’s solidified. But you see what it is?”
“Blood.”
“It’s easy to do. When you hold the glass pane, put it back, balancing it to prevent it from breaking. You can cut yourself. Fresh putty and fresh blood. Fresh DNA. If it’s from someone we’re investigating, there’s a good chance it might be in our database. And if it’s from a police employee at homicide unit it would also be in our database—we’ve all provided comparative tests so we can be excluded from the evidence. Do you understand what I’m saying, Ewert? Coming here and not finding a goddamn thing because we were too late, it’s not a bad thing—it’s the best thing that could have happened.”
10:01 AM
(1 day, 12 hours, and 1 minute remaining)
This time Piet Hoffmann didn’t have to wait with the crime victims who had come to the station to report Shkodër’s latest perpetrators. Latifi met him at the entrance, and Hoffmann followed his wide back through the employee entrance and into the tiny office that lacked any personality.
“We meet again.”
“Thank you—for seeing me.”
“We’re colleagues. Colleagues help each other.”
The black leather case with his badge and its coat of arms lay in his jacket pocket and Hoffmann wrestled down an impulse to pull it out, hold it. It still amazed him. Police officer. On paper. After all these years as an outlaw.
“Coffee?”
Two cups on the table. Very small. Very black contents.
“Turkish. I prefer it. Several times a day.”
Latifi took it in one gulp.
“Talk. Then we’ll see if I can do something for you.”
Hoffmann suddenly hesitated. Not long, but long enough for Latifi to notice it.
“If you want me to help you.”
“I do. But what I’m planning to do isn’t exactly without its dangers. And I honestly don’t know if I can trust you.”
“Don’t you want that?”
Latifi nodded to the untouched coffee and Hoffmann held up a hand to say no thank you. A couple of seconds later and Latifi had drained that one too.
“My boss, Ewert Grens, who you talked to on the phone, thinks I should trust you—and he never trusts anyone.”
“There you go.”
“So convince me, too.”
“You’re the one who needs help—not me.”
They stared at each other for a long time, silent.
Until Hoffmann stood up and walked over to the closed door.
When he turned to say goodbye, Latifi had taken off the police cap he was wearing on his last visit. And Hoffmann realized why. The entire upper part of his forehead was covered by a huge and ugly scar.
“Knife?”
“Bayonet. And then a bullet, from the side, that was supposed to blow away the rest.”
“And your eyes?”
“I only see out of one of them.”
Piet Hoffmann sat down again.
“You kept your mouth shut?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not going to tell me if I ask about what?”
“Exactly.”
Grens, on the other hand, did know about what. That’s what his trust was based on.
That was good enough. That counted.
Hoffmann put his hand on the sweaty police cap.
“Thank you. For this.”
“You’ve traveled a long way. When you could have sent an email. This is no ordinary investigation. It means more. Maybe it’s even personal?”
“Maybe.”
“So?”
“A house. Approximately where Rruga Komanit crosses Rruga Dasho Shkreli. Our investigation has led us there. To a tower room on the second floor. Superintendent Grens had guessed it was his kingly friend Zoltan sitting there making calls to some of his old friends. Now we know that wasn’t the case. And we need to know who was.”
Latifi had a kind smile.
And with the scar visible, he seemed even more human and less like an ideal.
“This, whatever it is you want to do, my boss is not going to like. And that is a damn good thing, Officer Larsson.”
10:42 AM
(1 day, 11 hours, and 20 minutes remaining)
“Now, you goddamn better answer me!”
Erik Wilson—who had just left the meeting from hell with the police union, which in its turn had succeeded a never-ending negotiation with the personnel department—had been looking forward to ten minutes of solitude in his office before the next meeting he also wanted to avoid, one with the auditors. But now Ewert Grens stormed in.
“You hear that, Wilson! And don’t you even think about leaving here until you give me a satisfactory answer!”
It wasn’t often the chief superintendent of the homicide unit found himself longing for one of those bureaucratic meetings. But now he did. A furious, spitting, hissing Detective Superintendent Grens was worse than all the budget deficit talks combined.
“Hello to you too, Ewert.”
“This morning I went to carry out a search, which you granted me a warrant for only under protest! And which very few people knew about! And I’ll be damned if someone didn’t get there before us and clear away every trace of evidence!”
“We have already been through this once. I’m not doing it again.”
“Either you’re the leak, Wilson, or someone very close to you is. Who are you seeing? Who are you so in love with that you can’t see clearly?”
“Okay. Then we will do it again. Go through it one more time. So listen carefully now: this has nothing to do with whom I’m seeing or not seeing. That is only in your head, Ewert. You’re going to have to find the leak elsewhere. Maybe with someone you trust in your proximity? And perhaps like too much to see clearly?”
“I know you understand what I’m saying—you’ve been an inadvertent accomplice, Wilson. There is no other reasonable answer! The safe is here, in your room! The search warrant came from here!”
“Sit down.”
“When you tell me!”
“Sit down, Ewert.”
Reluctantly, Ewert Grens dropped into the visitor’s chair.
Once the detective really got himself going like that it took a bit for him to wind down.
“I continued to investigate my office and the archive in the basement. Quietly. I requested a new group of analysts—and got some new answers.”
Grens really tried to sit still. But he couldn’t.
“And?”
Wilson bent over and tapped a hand against the heavy steel plate of the safe.
“In order to get into this, you need a PIN code, which in my case has never been written down, and a preprogrammed card, much like an access keycard for our doors. The new analysts made a total of four discoveries that proved how someone could get ahold of exactly that. Two discoveries up here, and two down in the basement.”
“Discoveries?”
“The first, how they got the PIN, we knew before: a very small webcam hidden in a crack in the wall. One in here, directed at my safe. One over the archive counter in the basement, directed through the prot
ective glass at the archive cabinet. When I entered the eight digits of my code, they showed up on the electronic display, and at the same time they were caught by the web camera. The person we’re looking for was able to receive my code on their computer or phone—via live broadcast.”
Then something started to happen in that office.
“At the very moment, Ewert, while I was here, doing my job!”
Their energies started to shift.
“Our job. Our mutual job!”
As Grens calmed down, Wilson became increasingly upset—as if only now was he starting to feel the impact of the crime he’d been subjected to. The chief of Sweden’s largest homicide unit had been surveilled and used. The victim of an advanced coup in the very place such coups were supposed to be thwarted.
“The other finds were two directional antennas. One out in the corridor, one outside the archive. Not much bigger than the webcams, and just as easy to hide. They can catch frequencies up to ten meters away and pass them on to a card scanner and a card programmer. Whoever set up those directional antennas could then put a blank card into a programmer, push enter, and fill it with the same information that was found on my card.”
When people like Wilson, who rarely got worked up, finally did so, it was different from when a person like Grens, who got worked up almost every day, raged around. It was more notable.
“So we have a double lock, Ewert! A PIN code that’s only in my mind! A frequency only available on my square plastic card! And then somebody here—in our unit, Ewert—someone we trust, mounted that fucking special equipment in the corridor we pass down every day. To hurt us and our work!”
The reversal continued. Something that had never happened before.
For once, Ewert Grens was calm, and Erik Wilson had to be calmed down.
“I know exactly how it feels.”
The detective superintendent was holding on to his boss’s trembling shoulders, trying to push the suppressed anger that had started to ooze out back inside.
“Realizing you have to be suspicious of those we’re closest to. Because how big is the pool we’re talking about? Twenty? Ten? Five?”
Wilson’s face flamed red, just like his neck.
And when he tried to answer, he couldn’t. Everything was stuck in that red flame.
So Grens continued.
“I asked Hermansson to spy on you, Wilson. Because you continued to withhold information that I believe is central. But she refused, and I didn’t understand why. So I asked Sven to spy on her instead. Of course, he refused. It’s the way we are, we don’t want, don’t want, don’t want to see what we sometimes have to see. But Sven changed his mind. Started watching her. And no one, you should be clear on that, is sadder or more disappointed than I am—but it doesn’t look good at all. Mariana Hermansson is behaving in a way she never has before. She’s lying. Skipping meetings. Popping up in places where there’s no reasonable explanation for her to be. Wilson—look at me—she might be the one we’re both looking for. And I want you to investigate her from now on—because I’m too close.”
4:33 PM
(1 day, 5 hours, and 29 minutes remaining)
“There. Black Audi. In front of the big gate. You see—he’s stretching out his arm, turning his head a little, inputting the pass code. His face, soon, if he just . . .”
“I have him.”
Piet Hoffmann and Gezim Latifi had been sitting on the roof of a run-down warehouse, spying on the two-story house, which was guarded by the same two guards that Hoffmann registered on his last visit. After almost five hours, the man they believed they were waiting for finally arrived. The telephoto lens that Latifi used was much more advanced than the Albanian police equipment Hoffmann had seen so far, and he was pretty sure it had to be Latifi’s own. The image of the driver was crystal clear. The sharp eyes, like an attacking hawk. The high forehead, the pale skin, the grizzled sideburns. After the gate opened and closed, and he drove into the yard and disappeared from sight, it wasn’t long before the lights turned on in the downstairs hall, then in the stairwell that led upstairs.
“I suspected it was him—now I know.”
“Know what, Latifi?”
“Who he is. The man you’re looking for.”
Latifi twisted one of the camera’s buttons and the photographed face went up another magnification.
“Kosovo Albanian. From Pristina. But he’s been popping up around here, in the Shkodër area, for the past few years.”
Hoffmann guessed he was around fifty. And as each part of the snapshot became easier to see, like small photographs turning into a large photograph, it was possible to discern thin rings of gold in his earlobes and a winding birthmark on his neck that a dermatologist might recommend sampling.
“Hamid Cana. Reminds me a bit of your King Zoltan. Except he’s alive. The kind you’ll find dozens of hits in our registries for, but never any prosecutions.”
Now the lights also turned on in the tower room, and through the window they caught a glimpse of him—or rather a dark suit that sat down next to what seemed to be a desk and switched on a computer screen.
“That house, actually the whole block of houses running due north, were once the home and workplaces for political instructors back in the communist days. Our version of the Russian political commissar, party officials with great power.”
Latifi grabbed a thin folder from his bag, took out a real estate map that he unfolded onto the sunny tiles of the roof. He circled the two-story house they were watching and pointed to one of its squares.
“That’s the room he’s sitting in. We know exactly what it looks like.”
Latifi smiled.
“Government bureaucracy can be handy sometimes. Everything needs an application and everything has to be approved, a good way to provide jobs and keep people under control. So—in the national archive I found both the map and these.”
In the folder was a bundle of loose paper. The architectural drawings. For the very house they were looking at.
“The tower room, according to these very officially stamped drawings in my hand, was the political commissar’s office. Here you can see it in detail, Larsson.”
Some people don’t need explanations. They just know.
“In case you were ever planning to visit, that is.”
Latifi folded the drawings and handed them to Hoffmann.
“Because if you came all the way here to find out who’s sitting in that house and running the gun smuggling route to northern Europe—I don’t think you have to look any further.”
They both studied the images on the camera’s display. The man with hawk eyes, gold earrings, and a cancerous-looking birthmark.
“How sure?”
“I’m not just sure, Larsson. I’m positive. He might not lead operations, but he’s deeply involved. And I know because I was the one who wrote several of those reports of suspicion about him—and my immediate boss has continually thwarted my attempts to proceed any further. For the very same reason King Zoltan was never charged, too many of my colleagues on the payroll of the arms smugglers.”
“Jesus, Latifi, I don’t get how you can take it.”
The Albanian policeman shrugged his wide shoulders.
“I too have a family to support.”
Then the smile came back again—or, when Hoffmann thought about, it had probably been there the whole time, ever since they pulled up to this old warehouse, forced their way in past a locked door, and made their way up to the roof.
“And now and then, Larsson, someone like you shows up—who needs my help spying on a two-story house and it gives me the chance to fuck with the system a little. It’s easy to go back to work the next day when I know my boss will lose one of his sources of income very soon.”
9:03 PM
(1 day and 59 minutes remaining)
“Grens?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Hoffmann here. Are you alone?”
“Go ahead. I’m in a good spot.”
“I just sent a picture to your phone.”
“Opening it now. I’m putting you on speakerphone. So I can look at it.”
“Do you recognize him?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“The eyes, the birthmark—I would have remembered them.”
“And the name—Hamid Cana?”
“Never come across that either.”
“This is who the security officers called. The man who was sitting in an office on the second floor of the house you tracked the call to. Who took over, or at least works with whoever took over King Zoltan’s weapons smuggling.”
“And we know that because?”
“Grens, you were the one who persuaded me to trust Latifi. And if we do—then yes, we know.”
“It’s just after nine.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Just a little more than one day left, Hoffmann, to find out who the man in that picture is working with in Sweden. The person who left three murders in their wake, that’s my job to solve, and whoever is threatening your family, which is your job to solve. One day—then I have to let Zaravic out, and he might just come into possession of some papers and figure out who put him behind bars for six years and made him miss his son’s funeral. If he gets that information, you and Zofia and the children will have every criminal in Stockholm after you—when it comes to things like that, they hunt in a pack. My search warrant didn’t really pan out as planned, and I have nothing for a prosecutor to hold him in detention longer than planned.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“Wrong—you do whatever the hell it takes, okay? I don’t want to know how, but make sure you get that fucking name.”
Late night in Shkodër.
Piet Hoffmann looked around at the desolate bar.
Even here there was a clock on the wall that seemed to be counting down.
The crumpled napkin he kept at the bottom of his knife holster now lay in front of him on the bar counter, between a bottle of local beer and the phone that had just carried Grens’s stressed voice. He ran a finger over the crosswords from one edge of the napkin to the other, chains of squares that became a plan, which had to be filled in and crossed out. He’d had two rows left, two words to solve, and now he crossed one more out.
Knock Knock Page 29