Knock Knock

by Anders Roslund

  Survive, eleven letters

  P—O—S—I—T—I—O—N—I—N—G

  But he left the very last one untouched.

  Survive, fourteen letters

  E—N—C—R—Y—P—T—I—O—N—C—O—D—E

  The crossword’s final boxes. In order to strike through those, he’d have to force a man with hawk eyes and an overgrown birthmark to talk. He was prepared to go a long way, just as Grens had insinuated, without going too far—a dead man could reveal no codes. He would have to enter a house surrounded by armed guards, get into a secured tower room, and then break a man who had probably endured torture in the past, but now had to be broken in just a few hours.

  Because that man was the key to the person in charge in Sweden.

  Because time was ticking.

  7:06 AM

  (14 hours and 52 minutes remaining)

  Cheese. Marmalade. Vanilla yogurt. Crispbread. Orange juice. And a cup of coffee for herself.

  They’d woken up early. Not because they needed to, sleeping made being here easier to stand, but Luiza started crying at six thirty, inconsolably, and woke up both Rasmus and Hugo, too. Now they were all squeezed close together on the sofa, which until a few days ago had belonged to someone else. Breakfast was set on the ugly glass coffee table and the morning news program was on the TV, which the boys had so far mostly used for video games that all seemed to be in one way or another about shooting each other. She closed her eyes. For a moment, she was somewhere else. Home. Normal morning, normal breakfast. The spoons clinking against the yogurt bowls, the crackers crunching as everyone chewed at the same time. Until she couldn’t help but look around at this apartment, which was so alien, and out through its window at a neighborhood she had never wandered.

  But the news in the morning studio was the same. The morning host was presenting images from violent demonstrations ahead of a Paris summit, the US president was promising to lower taxes from the White House pressroom, and UN troops had been attacked while guarding a food transport in West Africa. The Swedish news was also a repetition of last week, and the week before that—an explosion at a police station in Malmö, a twenty-year-old man killed in Norsborg, two schoolchildren severely injured after a knife attack in Bergsjön. She had turned to Luiza to adjust her bib and entice her with the last few bits of oatmeal and the last spoonful of mashed bananas, when Rasmus screamed.

  “Mamma! Look!”

  His voice was as surprised as it was confused.

  “That’s our house!”

  She didn’t really understand what he said at first, just calmly wiped food off Luiza’s cheeks and chin.

  “Mom! Look now!”

  So she did what Rasmus wanted.

  The flashing images of a rapidly changing Sweden were replaced by another picture. A war zone. That’s what it looked like. Like when missiles accidentally hit civilian targets far from the heart of the battle. The house that filled the TV screen was in a Stockholm suburb, and it had been attacked, destroyed, a powerful explosion turned it into smoking ruins and left blast marks on the surrounding houses. The bomb, the TV reporter said in her neutral news reporter voice, had detonated less than an hour earlier, and the neighborhood had been partially evacuated.

  Ice cold. Inside.

  She froze in a way she never had before.

  “Our house, Mom. It doesn’t exist anymore. Do you see?”

  Rasmus didn’t seem to know if he should be afraid or excited that their house, their whole block, was on TV. But he saw how Mom reacted, how Hugo—his big brother, who knew so much more than him—reacted, so he stopped talking. They didn’t want to hear what he had to say, he could see that they were sad.

  Then the image changed to a report from the Swedish Parliament and politicians debating the annual budget. Normal again. The world goes on.

  “Keep eating. I’m just going to the bathroom.”

  The cell phone was still behind the ventilation cover in the corner above the towel hanger, and she pressed the button for the only number that was preprogrammed into it.

  “Piet, it’s me.”

  She didn’t know where he was. His voice was as clear as if they were standing next to each other.

  “You were only going to call in case of emergency.”

  “This is an emergency.”

  “Zo?”

  “We were just now eating breakfast in front of the TV. Me and the kids. And there was a news report about a house being blown up. Our house.”

  “What . . .”

  “Someone blew up our house, Piet.”

  He hesitated a moment. Maybe it was the connection. If he was far away, that is.

  “Piet—what’s going on?”

  “I still can’t tell you that.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said? Our house has been bombed! It doesn’t exist anymore! Everything is gone! Everything!”

  She screamed.

  “Now you tell me what’s going on! Or I hang up and call the police! You decide, Piet!”

  He hesitated again. It wasn’t just the connection. She knew it.

  “You can’t call the police.”

  “So talk!”

  “The more you know, Zofia, the more dangerous it is for you and the children. We’ve talked about that. Before. That people like me, who do what I did, we just know how much a person should or shouldn’t know. And if you land in a situation, if you or Rasmus or Hugo or . . .”

  “Piet? Tell me now.”

  She heard his breathing. The worry. That he couldn’t control, and which therefore made him even more worried.

  “Someone’s leaking information at the police station, a dirty cop.”

  “A . . . ?”

  “A cop. Who’s working for criminals—and has access to all my records. Every secret meeting and every organization I informed on. Information they’re using to make me do something I don’t intend to do. That’s why I found a live hand grenade in Rasmus’s backpack. That’s why I’ve masked my identity and hidden all of you. And Zofia, now I’ve broken off contact with those who threaten us—and that’s why they blew up our house.”

  She held the phone tight long after they hung up, crumpled onto the floor, weeping. Sometimes that’s the only thing left for a person who can’t go forward and can’t go back, even though it hurts so much to be still.

  Then she opened the door and all her loves were waiting for her in the hall.

  Rasmus at the front, weeping like her, then Hugo a step behind with Luiza in his arms.

  “Mom, I . . . I want to be with you.”

  And Rasmus grabbed hold of her with no intention of letting go.

  “Then you’ll have to come in here with me. We have to change Luiza.”

  Rasmus slipped past her into the toilet as she spoke, worried Mom would change her mind, and she stared quietly at Hugo—her eldest, her wise son—as he handed over his little sister. She kissed his forehead, and then he was alone. Without any clue where he should go. The only thing he was sure of was that he wasn’t going to wait in some strange hall for Luiza’s diaper change or maybe bath when their house had just been blown up. After a while, he pushed the toilet door closed without Mom noticing. Now was his chance to figure out what he hadn’t been able to last time. The floor inside the closet in the bedroom. The one that moved when he jumped on it, and that had a little black knob in the back corner. If he was quick and had some luck, he could sit outside with the closet door open and not block whatever was in the floor with his own weight.

  It was nine quick steps from the bathroom to the bedroom.

  He didn’t walk, no, he ran.

  To the closet. Squatted down. Pulled on the small knob.

  And the whole floor . . . opened up.

  The square of wood just disappeared and when he lit his phone’s flashlight he was met by a la
rge, round hole.

  He leaned in and searched with his arm without reaching any stop. So he braced his legs against the low empty shelf, and lowered his top half into the hole. Then he reached it. A thin board. And when he knocked on it, he could hear there was nothing on the other side, it echoed.

  The hole under the wardrobe floor led somewhere else.

  Now he was sure.

  This was what Dad meant when he said there was an escape route.

  7:25 AM

  (14 hours and 37 minutes remaining)

  Keep going.

  Keep going without feeling.

  He was there again. At one of those moments that was always lurking, pulling at him. His longing to think about the only thing he couldn’t think about, which was also the only thing he wanted to think about.

  She’d said that their home had been destroyed, the center of their lives and their safety had been taken from them.

  There was only one way to interpret that.

  The people who threatened him were showing him they were prepared to take the next step if he didn’t obey—and the next step was people, not a house of wood and stone.

  So just like during the last moment, and the moment before that and before that, which wanted to fill him with doubt and longing, he now had to shield himself, avoid all emotion, never let that other reality in.

  There wasn’t much time left.

  But it could work.

  It had to.

  “Bad news, Larsson?”

  Latifi had chosen a café that opened early but rarely had guests until a few hours later. That’s why they were alone, other than the owner, who was at the stove behind the counter warming up sugar and water that he proudly announced would turn into the world’s best baklava.

  “You could say that.”

  “Well here comes a little something to balance it out. My news is good.”

  He laid a large envelope next to Hoffmann’s coffee cup.

  “Don’t open it yet. Wait until we part ways. The drawings you got when we were on the roof were from the general archive—these come from a much more classified vault. Highest confidentiality. I’m owed a few favors by a few officials. Last night I cashed a couple of them.”

  Piet Hoffmann knew what the Albanian police officer was actually saying. That he’d exposed himself to enormous risk in order to help a man he didn’t know from a country he’d never visited.

  “You already understand where all the rooms lie in relation to each other. The number of guards, surveillance cameras. Now you’ll have access to all of the less official paths in.”

  “In?”

  “When those houses were built for political commissars, they made sure to add a few secret entrances and exits. That was just the culture of one-party rule, that’s how you did it, but the nouveau riche who own them these days don’t know that.”

  Hoffmann had no idea what to say. “Thank you” wasn’t even close to enough. But that’s what he said anyway.

  “Thank you.”

  Latifi nodded briefly. Embarrassed. Not used to handling appreciation.

  “I also found out a little more about our man with the hawk eyes and the birthmark.”

  On top of the envelope he put down a photograph.

  “Hamid Cana splits his time between two places. Most of the time he’s in the house we were watching. But he also regularly travels a few miles up into the mountains to another house. To her.”

  A passport photo. A middle-aged woman with a slender face framed by long, dark hair. Few wrinkles though she seemed to lack makeup, a forced smile that exposed white, even teeth. She looked uncomfortable, but that meant nothing, very few are comfortable being photographed.

  “A relationship?”

  “Not by law. But a man who visits a woman his own age several times a week, sleeps over—well, what do you think?”

  Hoffmann nodded. Relationship. But it didn’t really matter. What Latifi was saying, what mattered, was that Hawk Eye left the two-story house regularly, he even spent some nights away. And that was when, with only a few guards left behind, an uninvited visitor might take the opportunity to enter through a secret tunnel few knew about, and avoid the extortion, violence, and perhaps even deaths that might otherwise be required to obtain the information he sought.

  “How about a piece for you; coffee?”

  The café owner had slipped over to the table and handed each of them a golden brown square that smelled like home and far away at the same time.

  “The layers of sugar might be a little on the warm side—but I think you can still have a taste.”

  They each took a piece, both because it smelled like heaven and to be polite, tried it, and thanked the café owner who was convinced he’d kept his promise and served them the world’s best baklava.

  “Well then, Larsson.”

  Latifi dried off his sticky fingers with a napkin.

  “Do you have all the information you need?”

  “If what you claim is actually in that envelope, then I have it.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re up to. Maybe that’s for the best. But I’ve made sure I can be at your disposal all day. If you need assistance.”

  “Can you do that? Without exposing yourself to risk?”

  “Listen, the fewer crackdowns I do, the happier my bosses are.”

  The café was still empty when Piet Hoffmann stood up, grabbed the envelope from the table, folded it, and slid it into his pocket. Keep going. Keep going. That’s all he could think about, had to think about. Keep going to a secret entrance, an encryption code, a name for a Swedish contact that Grens could focus his search on.

  8:36 AM

  (13 hours and 26 minutes remaining)

  A concrete foundation. Dressed in rubble. Only half of the brick walls still stood, a few metal cabinets stacked up, the rest was just black smoke coming from the corners the firefighters’ water jets hadn’t yet reached.

  Ewert Grens asked the head of the rescue service just one question when he first arrived. Now he asked it again.

  “No bodies?”

  “Still no bodies, Superintendent.”

  He walked down the closed-off residential street.

  It didn’t feel one bit better from a distance.

  A violent explosion was always followed by a violent shock wave, and the hammock he knew Zofia liked to sit in with her youngest in her arms, singing her to sleep, had been thrown against the fence. The swing set on the backside of the house had been blown away, the hedge to the neighbors’ that the boys crawled through lay in tatters.

  Contact had been broken, and this was the result.

  Grens hoped Piet Hoffmann was right, that his family was hidden somewhere else. In safety.

  The sun’s heat was combined with the heat of the smoldering ruins, air colored by soot. He saw Hermansson talking to the forensic technicians as they crawled around with plastic gloves and cameras, and the two cadets gathering witness statements from neighbors who had yet to be evacuated—their training periods had, in a very short time, included virtually every serious form of crime.

  Sven walked over to him, looking tired, too many early mornings.

  “We have to talk, Ewert. In private.”

  “Okay. Talk.”

  “First, this is—was—Piet Hoffmann’s house, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if I were to guess that this was related to everything that’s been going on recently? The executions? The documents that disappeared from Wilson’s safe? You asking me to follow Hermansson? No bullshit now, just answer me, Ewert.”

  “It’s related.”

  “Then it’s Hoffmann you’ve been collaborating with in a parallel investigation without telling me about it?”

  “It is.”

  “And this—
a bomb in a suburban neighborhood?”

  “A warning.”

  “That’s all you’re going to say?”

  “For now.”

  Sven Sundkvist had something else to discuss. An excerpt from a recent analysis of the blood traces they’d secured on a kitchen window during the search of Dusko Zaravic’s apartment.

  “No matches.”

  Sven held out his phone and the enlarged text of an email from the National Forensic Centre.

  “You see? The blood isn’t in any of our criminal databases. And—it also doesn’t match any employee of the homicide unit.”

  Ewert Grens tried his best to make out the letters that were still too small no matter how much Sven had enlarged them. But what he heard was good news, even though a match, a nearly one hundred percent identification, would of course have been better. This meant that no colleague of theirs had broken in. It didn’t rule out that someone had changed sides, had sold out their own world, but no one could be linked to the possible burglary meant to cover tracks.

  Sven Sundkvist had said what he came to say and had started to head back to a house that was no longer there. Grens joined him.

  “Sven?”

  “Yes?”

  “I want you to inform Hermansson and the cadets to wrap up their work here and head to my home.”

  “Your home, Ewert?”

  “For a meeting that we can only have there.”

  9:58 AM

  (12 hours and 4 minutes remaining)

  They’d all squeezed in, five people was one too many according to the small metal plate in the elevator, but since the two cadets and Mariana Hermansson were quite slim, and Sven was hardly what you’d call overweight, only Grens really contributed much toward reaching the maximum weight limit. ewert and anni grens. Both names stood above the mail slot. Despite all the years that had gone by. The detective superintendent thought he caught a few pitying looks, but didn’t react to them. He could have any damn names he wanted to on his own door.