On one of the TV monitors, obviously intended to be centered in the composition, just as much as Andy’s slumped-over body, you could see that the surveillance cameras had caught two faces looking out a window.
Zofia. And Hugo.
6:23 PM
(3 hours and 39 minutes remaining)
Piet Hoffmann stood in the middle of the tower room’s drenched floor and stared at his phone. He knew it was going to ring now.
“Good evening, Hoffmann. You thought you could break an agreement. That has a cost.”
The distorted voice.
“You just received some information. First a link to a telephone conversation. Then an interesting picture. Just so we’re clear on where we stand with each other. Okay?”
He was shaking.
An absurd picture.
Andy, staring at him, appealing to him, with extinguished eyes. Zofia and Hugo looking out through a window without knowing they were no longer protected.
He had never understood that fear could hurt so much.
“Good. Then I need you to listen to me. We know now where your family is hiding. But, unfortunately, we heard you’re running around in northern Albania and won’t be able to do what you’re supposed to in time.”
They had tracked down his position even though no one knew where he was.
They had access to his new, secret number.
Hoffmann could see only one explanation—the police leak wasn’t just located in the police station and the homicide unit. Grens had been right the whole time. The leak was in the detective’s inner circle.
“We don’t like executing families. Hit men are no problem, a Piet Hoffmann now and then is fine, you’ve chosen to be part of this twisted world of your own free will. But a wife? Three young children? They never had a choice. So I think there might be a way. We can postpone their deaths for a short time. Because we happen to have another little job that you can do right where you are. You have three and a half hours, if I count correctly, and if you can finish in time, we won’t execute your family. Yet.”
An electronic, distorted voice with no gender, no identity, who seemed so distant and monotone. But for a moment they almost sounded personal. As if they felt something, were more than just arms dealers.
“It’s like this: You went to Albania to look for Zaravic’s former employer. Realized he was dead, and started to seek out his successor. We know that much. And we want you to continue that. You find him, kill him. If you send us proof, a picture, we won’t give Zaravic that last document when he’s released tonight. The one with your name on it.”
A new mission? With just a few hours left?
The voice that for a moment became almost personal, revealing for the very first time a glimpse of something that wasn’t just programmed confidence and inaccessibility. A tiny, tiny crack in their invulnerability. And Hoffmann thought he knew why. The insight the organization’s Swedish branch had been given into Grens’s private investigation hadn’t just revealed that the detective superintendent—via Piet Hoffmann—was on his way to the other end of the smuggling route, where everything began. It had also revealed that if the Albanian leader was located, and if he were forced to speak, the Swedish members’ identities would be revealed too. That would be the end for them. So they’d rather sacrifice one of their own, because a dead man can’t talk. But they had no idea that Hoffmann already had access to all that information. A computer and a decryption key that were already in his backpack.
“Fail, Hoffmann—and you’ll be alone by tonight. Carry out the mission, and we’ll talk again, while your children and your beautiful wife will have at least a little longer—we are far from done with each other.”
Then the moment was over.
The monotonous, distanced, genderless voice was back.
“Oh and by the way. Avoid alerting the police. If we see even one cop at the apartment building where your family is hiding, we’ll blow up the whole damn place, regardless of our agreement. We’re pretty good at that, as you know.”
6:29 PM
(3 hours and 33 minutes remaining)
“Can we talk?”
“Talk.”
“You were right, Grens.”
“Yes?”
“The police leak is very close to you.”
“I used to think so. Now I’ve changed my mind. No one I trust has betrayed me.”
“You saw I destroyed the phone. Broke contact. You even warned me about it. Only you and Zofia and Latifi and Andy, one of my employees, got my new number. Andy was just murdered, but would never reveal anything. Zofia is the only one I trust, and Latifi also never talks, I’ve seen that for myself. So that leaves you, Grens. And if it’s not you, I don’t think it is, it’s someone who has been close to you in the last twenty-four hours.”
“What did you say? Just murdered? What do you mean by that?”
“I feel sick about it. But I don’t have time. Not yet. I’ll send you the address when I hang up. Take care of him.”
“If you . . .”
“Grens—they murdered my employee and called my new number to tell me about it! Someone knows that I’m involved and that I’m here! How many people are aware that I’m working with you? That cop lady who met me in the kitchen, she’s one—who else? Are there more, Grens!”
“Calm down.”
“My time is running out while we . . . I can’t afford to calm down when your dirty fucking cop finds out about everything I do, or while they wait outside the house where Zofia and the kids are hiding! They even smuggled a phone and documents into Zaravic’s cell! He knows now that an infiltrator got him locked up for six years—and when you let him out tonight, Grens, he’ll know it was me.”
6:34 PM
(3 hours and 28 minutes remaining)
First, the sound of heavy steps.
Then a loud voice.
Ujë.
He didn’t know very many Albanian words, but he’d picked up that one. That’s why he’d stopped at the gas station on his way to Shkodër. Two bottles, lukewarm. And that was what he’d been buying and carrying around in a city plagued by Mediterranean heat.
Ujë. Water.
That was what someone was shouting outside the door.
He hurried to the window. The yard was deserted.
The safe door was thrown against the wall, and that sharp ringing leaked out.
Two phone calls had distracted him while the sound had attracted the guards to the house. Now they had discovered the water running across the floor and seeping through the gap under the door.
They’d soon force the lock.
Piet Hoffmann looked around, searching four walls that had turned into a death trap.
6:36 PM
(3 hours and 26 minutes remaining)
Good training.
That’s what he thought when the armed guards broke down the door and made their way across the wet floor. Perfect pattern and in complete control while they quickly secured the area.
Good training—but they made one mistake.
Even though they were looking for an intruder in a locked room, where the window was closed and intact, they never looked up.
And when they reached the bookshelf that covered the far wall—where the leak seemed to originate—without understanding how or why shelves of trinkets would drip large amounts of water, they stopped in exactly the position Piet Hoffmann had hoped. He just needed to lie on his stomach on the attic floor and lower his gun slightly through the hole and press the trigger.
6:43 PM
(3 hours and 19 minutes remaining)
“Sven? Hermansson? Put your cups down and come with me.”
Ewert Grens, after a short search, had found them in the kitchenette at the end of the corridor, each with a fresh cup of coffee in hand, surrounded by stacks of papers sprea
d across the table and chairs, a few documents even sat on the dishwasher and fridge. Any other evening he would have taken a seat, relieved not to have to go home, grateful to be in the company of his closest coworkers.
“Now!”
This time, he didn’t even slow down, just kept walking toward the other end of the corridor, expecting them to follow his shouts. Soon he heard those familiar steps—Mariana’s had a determined bound, Sven’s were smoothly compliant. If it was true that the movement of our feet is an extension of our personalities, he wondered sometimes how he must sound.
“What’s this all about, Ewert?”
“Life and death.”
He pressed the elevator button, and Mariana and Sven caught up to him, stood on either side.
“Isn’t that always the case around here?”
“Right now the difference is just a matter of a few hours.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That Zaravic, in a locked and well-guarded cell, has learned the one thing I didn’t want him to know.”
Two elevators and three corridors later, the detective superintendent stormed into the eighth floor of the Kronoberg jail and could barely contain himself while the guard searched for the key in his rattling bundle. Dusko Zaravic was lying on his bunk, no longer in his tuxedo, just the shapeless uniform of the correctional facility. He didn’t seem especially surprised when three police officers barged into his tiny cell.
“Well, well, you’re a little early.”
“Stand up.”
“And here I thought you were gonna hold me until ten. But of course, I’d be happy to head home now. How about a beer this evening, Superintendent?”
“Get up so we can search your cell!”
Sneered. That’s what Zaravic did. While Grens and Mariana and Sven turned over what little there was to turn in that cell.
“Did you lose something, Detectives?”
“Undress.”
“Mmm . . . that I did not see coming. You and me, Detective?”
“The sweater, pants, underwear, socks, slippers. You shake them while I watch, then drop them into a nice little pile on the floor.”
The sneering smile turned into a sneering laugh as Zaravic exposed his pale, naked body, and posed with exaggerated coyness for his three visitors.
“Do you like it? What about you, beautiful police lady? And you, my silent stranger? Or maybe the old cop, maybe you . . .”
“Grab your fucking buttocks, bend forward, and spread until I’m satisfied. Okay?”
Zaravic had been detained and imprisoned before. He shrugged, turned around, and did as he was asked.
“Like this?”
“Get dressed.”
“You seem disappointed, Superintendent. Were you looking for something? Because if there were anything, I mean, like a phone or maybe some paper, you know, the kind of thing you could end up with in a cell, well, if that were the case then I guess I would have pretended I needed to go to the bathroom not that long ago, and flushed all that shit. I mean, if I were to have it.”
Grens didn’t say a word as he pushed Sven and Mariana aside, threw open the cell door, and rushed across the hallway toward the toilets. He pulled on the plastic gloves he always kept in the inner pocket of his jacket and knelt down with aching legs and hips in front of one toilet bowl at a time. But no matter how far he dug or how far he pushed his hand into the pipe, he met only water. The phone was gone. And with it the possibility of tracing where the call came from.
He was furious.
But he’d never let that smiling bastard see it.
He commanded Sven and Mariana to leave the cell and slammed the door without so much as a glance at the still-naked Zaravic, then hurried to the guards’ glass cage.
“Do you have a spare cell?”
“What?”
“A cell. Unoccupied.”
The young guard seemed to think he hadn’t heard right.
“An empty cell?”
“Yes?”
“What are you gonna do with that?”
“Is there one or not?”
The third cell on the opposite side of the hall from Zaravic was until just a few hours ago home to a suicidal junkie. It wasn’t particularly clean. But Grens didn’t notice that or the pungent odor as he ordered Sven and Mariana to come inside and close the door behind them.
“Which one of you?”
Sven and Mariana looked at their boss, then at each other.
“Which one what, Ewert?”
“Goddamnit—who! Who leaked the information about Hoffmann so fresh, so unique that it only could have come from one of very few I trust, someone close to me. Really. Fucking. Close. There’s no other explanation. And I’ve had enough!”
Ewert Grens used to hit things when he couldn’t keep this rage inside. Better than hitting people. The shiny rolling instrument carts at Forensic Medicine in Solna made a quivering ring that corresponded to the anxiety he sometimes felt in the presence of the dissected dead, and his own coffee table in his office made a dull thud when it hit his corduroy sofa. Here there were no tables. So he used the white walls, an almost silent sound that barely registered even though his knuckles turned the white paint red.
“Please, Ewert, please calm down.”
“Calm down, Hermansson? I’ve worked here for more than forty years! I’ll be retiring soon! But I have never—never—been used like this!”
He and Hoffmann shared that. They didn’t trust anyone. They talked about it, how now and then you have to choose to trust. But one thing that Grens realized was when a person chooses to trust, they also expose themselves to the risk of being betrayed.
“Answer me!”
And that was exactly what had happened.
“Which one!”
Mariana Hermansson had backed against one cell wall as he screamed at the top of his lungs. She stepped forward, stood close to him again; she simply didn’t like when people tried to scare her.
“I warned you, Ewert, do not doubt me again. I even told you it would be the same as losing me, either you trust me or you don’t. But you won’t listen! You run around accusing me and Sven and Wilson, and then you do it again! I understand that this is stressful, that the whole investigation is personal for you—I’m even happy that you can feel anything at all. But now, Ewert, you’ve lost not only me, you’ve lost yourself.”
“You’ve changed your pattern, Mariana.”
“What?”
He was no longer screaming.
And yet, his statements were sharper, more aggressive—they cut deeper.
“I’ve had you followed. You lie about canceled meetings, spend time in places you have no connection to.”
“What did you say? You had me followed? Who . . .”
She stopped short. She’d seen a movement on Sven. Some discomfort on his face.
Shame.
That was the expression. She was sure of it.
“You . . . ?”
And now he looked down at the cell floor.
“You, Sven? Have you . . .”
“Yes. Ewert asked me.”
A cell is a tight space. Too tight for two people’s rage.
And now Mariana Hermansson’s fury crashed into that of Ewert Grens.
“Ewert?”
“Yes?”
“When we’re done with this, when this investigation is over—you and I are over, too.”
“Excuse me?”
“After ten years? Everything we’ve gone through? And you still don’t know if you can trust me!”
“People will do anything if they’re forced to, Hermansson. Is someone threatening you? Like Hoffmann? I would understand if that were the case, and if so, we can turn it back on them, if you just let me . . .”
“Ewert,
it’s me.”
“What?”
“I admit it.”
Now Sven lifted his gaze from the floor.
Now Grens punched the wall with his other fist.
“You, Mariana?”
“Yes, it’s me. I’m Wilson’s secret relationship.”
It was so quiet.
Still.
Despite three people breathing in so little space.
“Now I’m getting a little . . . Wilson?”
“Yes.”
“So you and he . . . ?”
“Yes.”
There was a small stool next to the bunk, just like in all the other cells. Grens sank down onto it, sank into himself.
“So . . . so . . . that was what your small lies and canceled meetings and strange walks were all about?”
“Yes.”
It was no longer just his hands and knuckles . . . it was as if he’d run his whole body straight into that cell wall. He’d been going in the wrong direction and someone had stopped him.
Dizzy.
That’s how he felt.
“Well, that’s, well . . . very nice. That you found someone, I mean. And that Wilson found someone. That you no longer, well, need to live alone, I mean. But still—he’s your commanding officer, Mariana. You work in the same unit. One of you is going to have to transfer. That’s what the regulations say. Don’t you know that?”
“And why do you think we didn’t want to talk about it?”
The stool was hard, lacked any back support, and it was difficult for him to sit without pain. But he couldn’t stand up, not yet. He asked Sven and Mariana to leave the cell and wait for him at the guard’s box. He had heard what she said. He knew her so well, her serious ways that he’d come to depend on so much. Lost me. You and I are over, too. Unlike him, she’d never say that and not mean it.
He had nobody other than those two. His closest colleagues were also his closest friends.
And he already knew how it would feel, once he had time to feel. When the last few hours of this race against time were over, and he could do no more for Hoffmann. Despair. That was what awaited him if she really did leave him, and he hated that goddamn terrible feeling, he’d tried his best to bear it after Anni disappeared.
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