Knock Knock

by Anders Roslund

  Grens thanked him and for once did as he was told, slipped it into his inner pocket, and left the room. On to the coffee machine for two cups, black.

  He’d had three days. He didn’t anymore.

  Time was running out.

  1:29 PM

  (8 hours and 33 minutes remaining)

  One hundred and four steps. Between the wall at the beginning of the tunnel and the wall at its end. Here, according to the paperwork, another brick would open the door. Now he had to wait. Until Latifi texted that Hawk Eye and his guards had left the house.

  2:14 PM

  (7 hours and 48 minutes remaining)

  Piet Hoffmann couldn’t wait any longer. On the other side of this brick wall there was a phone or a computer or a safe that contained information that would lead him to a distorted voice and the organization that threatened him. He was so close, but time was ticking and Latifi’s signal never seemed to arrive. He had to be sure that the passage worked. So he pressed the brick, which this time sat at the top in the center, and heard that same metallic click as at the other end of the tunnel. A piece of the wall slid up. A door with uneven edges. And he was hit with the smell of oil, the sound of a dripping tap—another boiler room, but in the basement of that white two-story house with a tower.

  2:50 PM

  (7 hours and 12 minutes remaining)

  He rested, stretched out on the concrete floor beneath a jumble of pipes of various sizes that ran back and forth between modern heat pumps and very old oil boilers. Now and then he thought he heard voices, but knew that was impossible; the boiler-room door was closed, and according to the drawings it was far from the basement entrance. It was easy to imagine life when your own life didn’t feel real. Just a few days ago, he’d set the kitchen table in his family’s home, opened the window, and called out to two boys to come inside and eat their snacks. Now that home no longer existed, the boys were hidden with their mother and little sister, and he was in a disguise, armed, lying in a basement in northern Albania.

  3:15 PM

  (6 hours and 47 minutes remaining)

  He jumped a little when the text arrived. The phone buzzing in his palm. It was time. Latifi, who was watching from the roof of the warehouse, wrote that Hamid Cana had just driven away from the house, accompanied by his personal bodyguards, which usually meant an overnight trip to the woman in the mountains. Two guards remained outside, and inside, a man cleaning upstairs. Piet Hoffmann left the boiler room and headed for the stairs, then up to the ground floor. New message from Latifi. The guards were facing the gate and the cleaner was in one of the bedrooms. Hoffmann hurried through the kitchen and living room to the next staircase, toward the upper floor, and could now see the guards’ backs, hear the vacuum cleaner.

  Quick steps to the tower room, he pushed the handle down.

  Locked.

  He continued into the next room, probably the master bedroom, careful to close the door behind him. He stabbed the plaster ceiling with his knife, and then slid a small battery-operated jigsaw, not much larger than a screwdriver, in where it could now grab hold. He pushed a chair over, and lifted himself up through the hole. The attic space between the roof and the ceiling was smaller than he expected, but large enough to be able to crawl. When he estimated he was in the middle of the tower room, he sawed open a new hole, dropped his backpack, and then jumped down himself, landing on a handmade rug.

  3:45 PM

  (6 hours and 17 minutes remaining)

  Piet Hoffmann snuck over to the window, carefully peeking out—the guards’ attention was still directed toward the iron gate and the surrounding wall. Attacks from outside, not in.

  He’d turned the tower room upside down and still couldn’t find what he was looking for.

  What he needed to survive.

  Nowhere in the Albanian arms dealer’s office were there any documents that revealed the Swedish members of the organization.

  Nor did the phone, which he found in a now broken-open desk drawer, lead him any further—all communication had been encrypted.

  The computer, which he had seen the hawk-eyed man working on via Latifi’s telephoto lens, was also protected—encrypted information that couldn’t be accessed without the code.

  There was only one more option. He had to find the encryption key.

  It had to be here, somewhere. He was sure of it. No one who regularly changed his RSA code—a combination of fifteen or maybe even twenty numbers and letters and question marks and dashes—could keep that in his head. That kind of asymmetric encryption code had to be written down.

  If he found that key, he could decrypt the contents of the computer. See where the track led him. He’d infiltrated every kind of criminal organization and knew that whether they were selling drugs or humans or weapons, they all had one thing in common—they kept good books. Not because they were proud. Or because they weren’t aware of the risk of preserving evidence. It was about preventing unnecessary violence. Making sure that everyone involved could see that the money was being distributed fairly. It minimized the risk of these constitutionally suspicious individuals suspecting they were getting screwed and starting to war against their own instead of rival gangs and the police.

  He looked around the room he’d already searched.

  Looked at everything he could see. And everything he couldn’t.

  “Latifi?”

  He’d called the Albanian policeman who was watching the house from the roof, who probably caught a glimpse of him now and then.

  Maybe he even saw him right now.

  “Yes?”

  He had a feeling how this might play out.

  “The drawings. You got them handy?”

  “Yes.”

  “The tower room. How big is it?”

  “Wait.”

  Hoffmann heard a rustle, heard the click of Latifi’s glasses case.

  “Six meters and thirty-five centimeters long, five meters and twenty centimeters wide.”

  “Just a second.”

  He chose the wall on the opposite side of the window, where he was least visible, walked across the room, one foot in front of the other from wall to wall. He knew that his feet were twenty-eight centimeters long, and after two rounds he had an answer he felt was correct.

  “I thought so.”

  “What, Larsson?”

  “The room is smaller than I remembered the drawing. More square. I got five meters and fifteen on one side and five and twenty on the other.”

  “One meter and twenty centimeters shorter in one direction.”

  “Yep. And I think I know why.”

  A dark oak built-in bookshelf covered most of the far wall. He’d run across brick walls that turned into doors only a few times, but hidden rooms were more common. They were also usually easier to detect. He had completely missed this one. Cleverly constructed—even now, when he concentrated on every corner, edge, and strip of wood, nothing revealed itself. He knocked, listened, grabbed hold of shelves, pressed and wiggled various curved ornaments. Until he, more or less by mistake, leaned against the glass door of an illuminated cabinet with a hodgepodge of trinkets inside, and just like the brick wall—there was an almost inaudible click. The glass door just followed his hand back, and before he knew it, the entire shelf wall was gone.

  A hidden room.

  One meter deep, a few meters wide. With a single object inside. A safe.

  Here.

  The encryption key had to be inside that heavy steel structure.

  4:01 PM

  (5 hours and 59 minutes remaining)

  He’d blown safes before, most recently in northern Africa. But this time, a regular, fast explosion wouldn’t work. The whole neighborhood would be able to hear that, and he didn’t want them to find out he was here before time was up. It would attract the guards, and if people were to die, there was
a law-abiding police officer not far away who would be forced to act—and Hoffmann wanted that police officer on his side, not against him. Above all—it was too risky for the contents, the encryption key.

  He would have to open it in another way. A slower, more cumbersome way, one he rarely used and that would eat up time he didn’t have.

  He took a small drill, detcord and a detonator, a plastic pipe and a tightly rolled hose out of his backpack. He drilled a hole through the safe—the outer layer of steel, the middle section of concrete, the interior of steel—and poked through the thin pipe connected to the hose. Now he needed water. Latifi’s latest message had said that the room next door was being dusted now, and the cleaner never even noticed Hoffmann until two hands were around his chest, and soon he was bound to a pipe inside the bathroom. With one end of the hose on the faucet, the time-consuming work of filling the safe with water began. Piet Hoffmann checked to make sure the first liter had reached its destination and sat down on the floor. Now all he had to do was wait, and check now and then to make sure the guards were still in their places, with their attention turned in the wrong direction, ready to meet any external enemy.

  5:43 PM

  (4 hours and 19 minutes remaining)

  Filling a safe with a few hundred liters of water via a very small drilled hole no more than eighteen millimeters in diameter was like filling a bathtub through a McDonald’s straw. It took even longer than feared.

  He was looking at the time, estimating about fifteen minutes more, when the safe should be full and the detcord could be poked in and ignited.

  When the phone started to vibrate in his hand. A text message. From a number he didn’t recognize.

  Not one of the four he’d given his number to. Neither Zofia, Grens, Latifi, or Andy.

  A text with a link to a voice message. That was it. No instructions, no greeting. He pressed the link and was thrown straight into a recorded phone call between two unknown voices.

  “It took you a while to answer.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Aren’t you at all curious how a phone ended up in the mattress in your cell?”

  “I don’t give a shit.”

  The same distorted voice that threatened him, and which he’d broken off contact with.

  Hoffmann had no doubt. That was the voice that spoke first.

  “You got a phone, now a gift. Look at the stool next to the bed, the one anchored to the floor. You’re not supposed to be able to unscrew the seat—but you’ll be able to. And when it comes off you’ll be looking down into a hollow pole.”

  And the second voice, the man who had been called, had a slight accent.

  “Just tell me who the hell you are and what the fuck you want then hang up.”

  He recognized the man’s voice. But couldn’t place it. However, the situation was slowly becoming clear. The man being called was in a prison or in a jail.

  Who was he?

  And why did someone want Piet Hoffmann to listen to this?

  “I’m not hanging up. You’ll be grateful for that fact. Also, when we’re done, you’ll have a phone inside the Kronoberg jail that you can use however you want. How many of your neighbors have that?”

  Kronoberg jail?

  Now he knew. That voice.

  Zaravic.

  “I don’t get what you’re talking about.”

  “Have you unscrewed the seat?”

  “No.”

  “Do it. And tell me what you see.”

  There was a bump. Then Zaravic sounded like he was farther from the phone. And a scraping, rustling sound as paper was unfolded and smoothed out.

  “You found it?”

  “If it’s a bundle of papers you’re talking about, I did.”

  “Good. But let’s start with you. You’re sitting in a jail cell even though there’s no reasonable evidence.”

  “Not the first time.”

  “But do you know why?”

  “Because the idiots think I killed my friends. Or that I’m next.”

  “They probably thought that was the case. And that’s the official explanation. But that was never the main reason. Okay? The main reason was there’s a cowardly little shit who instead of doing what he’s supposed to do decided to work off the record for Grens and follow a trail to Albania. And that cowardly little shit was a little worried some documents that have gone missing might reach you and mess up his pretend police work.”

  “Still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Piet Hoffmann had clicked on the link sent from an unknown number.

  Now he realized why. The distorted voice wasn’t just talking about him indirectly—he was speaking to him.

  He shouldn’t listen anymore.

  He had to focus on the safe, which would soon be filled with water.

  But he let the sound roll on.

  Trying to understand what was happening.

  “Zaravic? Are you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “If you look at the first paper, which has a red ‘1’ in the right corner. If you read the fifth line, you’ll see a name. Paula. A code name that belonged to a successful infiltrator. On the next row you’ll see the initials EW. Stands for Erik Wilson, who was a handler in the homicide unit at the time, and is now its chief. You’re reading from a report written during the police’s secret and illegal criminal infiltrator project.”

  “And?”

  “Go a little farther down. Rows eighteen to twenty-three, I underlined them. There you’ll see another name. Yours. Because right there, this infiltrator, Paula, is the one who gathered the evidence that sentenced one Dusko Zaravic to prison for assault and kidnapping, and made him miss his son’s funeral. And isn’t it true, Dusko, that you’ve been searching for a long time for the person who ratted you out? Now you’ll know. If you look at the next paper. There’s a copy of what was kept sealed in an envelope, Paula’s real name. Do you see?”

  “No.”

  “Ah, you don’t see. Because I’ve crossed it out.”

  “What the fuck . . .”

  “But I promise: you’ll get it—along with the address where his family is hiding—when you’re released in a few hours. Yes, unless that cowardly little shit stops what he’s doing and heads home to complete the mission I gave him. He really should do that. Because he has children, too. Just like you used to.”

  That was the end of the recording. And Piet Hoffmann understood exactly what it meant. If Dusko Zaravic got that last document.

  But he didn’t understand the rest. Like how a phone and classified documents had been placed in a closed jail cell. Or how the distorted voice could know he was in Albania tracking down a dead weapons dealer. And, what he understood least of all—was how this number, which he gave to only four people he trusted, had ended up in the wrong hands.

  5:59 PM

  (4 hours and 3 minutes remaining)

  A few more liters.

  The safe was completely full now.

  He poked in the detcord, then detonated it.

  It made a dampened bang inside that left the contents mostly whole. But when the safe door came loose, it hit the wall hard and the metallic sound was sharp and loud. That could have penetrated through the window of the tower room. He stood still. Listening. Had the guards heard anything? Did they turn their attention to the house instead of the gate? Were they on their way—here?

  No voices. No sound.

  After waiting ten minutes, he decided to examine the interior of the safe.

  The banknotes packed on the upper shelves were soaking wet, but would retain their value when they dried. He wasn’t interested in them. He got down on his knees in the water that flowed out over the floor and searched the lower shelves for anything that might contain the encryption key. He soon foun
d, beneath a jewelry box and a couple of smaller gold bars, a little notebook with a black cover. He knew of course that documents could be damaged by water, by the blast and gas expansion, but also the notes in a closed notebook would probably still be intact as long as they weren’t written down with the wrong kind of pen.

  6:12 PM

  (3 hours and 50 minutes remaining)

  He had flipped to the last page of the notebook and cried out.

  From joy, from relief.

  Everything was possible again.

  There they were—row after row.

  Written down and crossed out RSA codes.

  Neither pencil nor marker—Hamid Cana had used an ordinary ballpoint pen, and its ink wasn’t affected by the water. And at the very bottom, on a line that began with yesterday’s date, stood twenty letters and numbers and characters in no particular order at all, which had not yet been crossed out.

  The current code. With this he would be able to decrypt the contents of that computer and find whoever was trying to take over the Swedish weapons market by threatening his family and murdering their competitors. He could tell Grens, who would then have enough time to act.

  Piet Hoffmann didn’t laugh, he was too busy, but his elation felt almost tangible, softened his whole body as he left the safe and pushed the secret entrance back into place. He’d packed Cana’s computer and phone into his backpack and was climbing up to the hole in the ceiling, when his phone buzzed again. The same number. But no link this time—just a picture. At first Hoffmann couldn’t make out what he saw. Then he magnified it. Now he could see—but he didn’t want to.

  The picture was of Andy.

  A dead Andy.

  Slumped over at his usual place, his head had those unmistakable double bullet wounds.

  The rest of the studio apartment was visible in the background—the drawn blinds, the monitors with their various surveillance images. And when Hoffmann enlarged a little more, he saw something else he wished he hadn’t.