He leaned forward as he walked, dressed in a white-and-gray camouflage uniform. He was in his forties and had introduced himself as Sterner.
"I can't do this."
As they walked over to the church and then went up the stairs and the aluminum ladder, Ewen Grens had described a hostage drama that was out of control and might culminate in a shot from the church tower.
"Can't? What the hell do you mean?"
The military marksman who, for another five hours and thirty-eight minutes would legally serve as a policeman, had emerged onto the narrow balcony and switched places with one of the two men already lying there.
"This is not a normal sniper rifle. It's an M107. It's a heavier, more powerful, anti-materiel rifle. For targeting buses. Or boats. Exploding mines.
He had greeted the colleague who was still there and would function as an observer.
"Long distance. That was the information I was given. That was what I should be prepared for. But this- I can't shoot at a soft target."
Holding the binoculars, he had observed Piet Hoffmann in one corner of the window and realized what this was all about.
Now he looked at Grens.
"I'm sorry, so he-that man there-is a soft target?"
"Yes."
"And… what exactly does that mean?"
"It means that the ammunition that I have with me is fire and explosive ammo, and can't be used for a person."
Grens laughed-at least that was what it sounded like: a short, irritated laugh.
"So… what the hell are you doing here?"
"The firing distance is fifteen hundred and three meters. That was the job I was given."
"The job you were given was to prevent someone from taking the lives of two other people. Or, if you prefer it-one soft target taking the life of another soft target."
Sterner focused the binoculars on the hostage taker, he was still standing in the same place by the window, exposing himself, and it was hard to understand why.
"I'm just complying with international law."
"A law… for Christ's sake, Sterner… they're made up by people who hide behind desks! But this… this is reality. And if the guy who is standing there, the soft target, the one who is our reality right now, if he's not stopped, other people will die. And both of them and their nearest and dearest will presumably be extremely pleased to know that you are complying with… what was it now… international law."
The binoculars' zoom was powerful and despite the fact that his hands were moving in the wind, it was easy to follow the man who had long fair hair and sometimes turned and looked down at something-the hostages, Sterner was sure of it-that was lying on the floor close to him; that was where they were.
"If I do what you want me to, if I fire at this sniper, with the ammo I've got here, he'll lose his arms and legs. They'll be blown clear off the body. There will be nothing left."
He lowered the binoculars and looked up at Grens.
"You'll find the soft target, the person-you'll find body parts everywhere."
The face, the mouth, it was there again.
The man in the blue crumpled guard uniform got up. The same monitor as the last time, the same camera that had been turned away from the concrete wall. Bergh was still warm but had switched off and moved the desk fan so that it was now by the wall in the small central security room-he needed more space in order to see properly when he linked up and transmitted the picture on all sixteen screens.
The mouth was saying something, and then the other one, another person, Jacobson, naked and bound. The hostage taker was holding him and suddenly took a step back: he wanted to make sure that they could see that he had a miniature revolver to Jacobson's head. And then he said the words again.
Bergh didn't need to rewind this time.
He recognized the first words.
He is a dead man.
And the three last words were incredibly easy to interpret from the clear lip movements.
In twenty minutes
Sven Sundkvist ran up the church stairs with the mobile phone in his hand. His conversation with a distressed voice from central security had been clear: they had been given a countdown and every minute, every second meant less time to make a decision. He straightened the ladder, opened the hatch and crawled out on to the balcony. Ewert was there with the new marksman and his observer. Sven told them all loudly that there wasn't time anymore to discuss things that had already been discussed.
Ewert looked at him, his eyes alert, the vein on his temple pulsing. "How long ago?"
"One minute and twenty seconds."
Ewert Grens had been expecting it, but he thought that it might take longer, that he would have more time. He sighed; so that's how it was, that's how it always was, there was never enough time. He held on to the railing and looked out over the small town, over the prison. Two worlds only meters apart, but two separate, unique worlds with their own rules and expectations, that had absolutely fuck-all to do with each other.
"Sven?"
"Yes?"
"Who is he?"
"Who?"
"The prison warden?"
The man in the window over there, behind the reinforced glass, he knew, Hoffmann knew exactly how it fucking worked and he had decided that it would start now, that we will act because of an elderly guard. And he's right. It's the gray-haired prison warden we care about. If… if it had only been a drug dealer with a long sentence, well, it wasn't easy to say, to imagine, we might not have made such an effort.
"Sven?"
"Just a moment."
Sven Sundkvist looked through his notebook, tightly written pages in foutain pen ink, not used by many these days.
"Martin Jacobson. Sixty-four. Has worked at Aspsås since he was twenty-four. Married. Grown-up children. Lives in the town. Liked, respected, no threat."
Grens gave a distracted nod.
"Do you need more?"
"Not right now."
The anger. His inner engine, the driving force, without which he would be nothing. Now it rook hold of him, shook him hard. No way, no goddamn way was that naked, bound man with a miniature gun to his eye, who had worked for forty years for peanuts with people who hated him, going to die on a foul-smelling workshop floor one year before retiring, no bloody way.
"Sterner?"
The military marksman was lying by the railing a bit farther along the balcony, holding up the binoculars.
"You're a police officer now. You are a police officer now. For five and a half hours more. And I have been assigned as gold commander here. So I am your boss. And that means that from now on you must do exactly as I order you to do. And I am, now listen carefully, not particularly interested in arguments about soft targets and international law. Do you understand?"
They looked at each other-he didn't get an answer, but he hadn't expected one either.
The big window.
A naked, sixty-four-year-old man.
He remembered another person, another hostage, nearly twenty years ago now, but he could still feel the choking rage. Some children in care, lethal and criminal, had planned to escape, so they decided they needed a hostage and had assaulted a retired woman who was doing some extra work in the kitchen. Cheap screwdriver to her throat, they chose the weakest member of staff and she had later died, not while she was being held hostage but as a result of it-they had somehow stolen her life from her and she didn't know how to take it back.
This was just as bloody cowardly, just as premeditated, the oldest member of the staff, the weakest in the group.
"I want to take him out of action."
"What do you mean."
"Injure him."
"I can't."
"Can't? I just explained-"
"I can't, as I would have to shoot at his torso. And from here… the target's too small. If I was to shoot at one of his arms, say, first of all there is a risk that I would miss, and second, if I did hit one arm, other parts of his body would also be shot to bi
ts."
Sterner handed the gun to Grens.
The black, almost skinny weapon was heavier than he had imagined, he guessed about fifteen kilos, the hard edges pressing against his palm. "That sniper gun… the force of impact would destroy a human body." "And if you hit him?"
"He'll die."
The earpiece had almost fallen out a couple of times so he kept his finger on it, like before, every word was crucial.
"Injure him."
Something crackled, a disturbance. He changed ears-the reception wasn't any better. He concentrated, listened, he had to-had to-understand every word.
`And if you hit him?"
"He'll die."
That was enough.
Piet Hoffmann crossed the room to the small office with a desk at the back. He pulled open the top drawer and picked up the razor that was lying in an otherwise empty compartment between the pens and paperclips, then a pair of scissors from the pencil case. He carried on to the storeroom, to the warden called Jacobson who was still sitting against the wall. Hoffmann checked the plastic packing tape round his wrists and ankles, then with one tug he pulled down the curtain from the window and, picking up the rug from the floor, he went back into the workshop and the other hostage.
The little plastic pockets of nitroglycerine were still attached to his skin. The pentyl fuse was tightly wound around his body. Hoffmann met his pleading eyes as he threw the rug over him and secured it with the curtain.
He pushed the barrel of diesel by the workbench over and positioned it by the hostage's legs.
He groped under the rug, found the detonator and taped it to one end of the pentyl fuse.
Then he went back to the window, looked up at the church tower, and at the gun that was pointing at him.
* * *
They were standing by one of the tall windows on the second floor of the Government Offices. They had just opened the thin glass window wide and were drinking in the fresh, cool air. They were ready. Forty-five minutes earlier they had informed the gold commander on site at Aspsås church that he would shortly have the military marksman he had requested. He was already on his way.
What was irresolvable was now resolvable.
Everything was in place for a decision to be made based on the available documentation.
A decision that was Ewert Grens's alone, that he would shortly make on his own and for which he would be solely responsible.
* * *
He had never been in a church tower before. Not as far as he could remember. Maybe as a child, on some school trip traipsing behind an ambitious class teacher. Strange, really-all these years of training and he had never fired from such an obvious place: a church that was the highest point here as in many other places. He leaned back against the wall and looked at the heavy cast iron bell. He was sitting in there alone, resting as he should do, as a marksman always does before firing, a moment of peace in his own world while the observer stayed with the gun.
He had arrived at the church an hour earlier. In five hours' time he would be back in Kungsangen, he would have left his temporary post with the police and have been re-employed by the army. On his way here he had assumed it was a matter of shooting at an inanimate target. But that was not the case. In a few minutes he was going to do something he had never done before. Aim and fire a loaded gun at a person.
A real person.
The kind that breathes and thinks and will be missed by someone. "Object in view."
He wasn't afraid of firing the shot, of his ability to hit the target.
But he was afraid of the consequences, the internal ones, which you can never prepare for, like what death does to the person who kills.
"I repeat. Object in view."
The observer's voice was urgent. Sterner went out into the light wind, lay down, held the weapon steady in his hands, waited. The shadow in the window. He looked at the observer-he felt the same thing, had made the same observation: neither of them were convinced that the man standing down there in profile didn't realize that it was in fact possible to hit him at this distance.
"Preparing to fire."
The heavy detective superintendent with the aggressive manner and a stiff leg that looked like it hurt more than he wanted to show was standing directly behind him.
"If Hoffmann doesn't withdraw his threat, I'm going to order you to shoot. His time runs out in thirteen minutes. Are you ready?"
"Yes."
"And the ammo?"
Sterner didn't turn around, he stayed lying on his stomach the whole time, facing the prison, his eye focused on the telescopic sight and a window on the top of Block B.
"With the correct information, I would have loaded and used the undercalibrated ammunition that is leaving Kungsingen in a helicopter this very moment and that won't get here in time. With this… if I'm going to penetrate reinforced glass to hit the target… it'll work. But I repeat… it isn't possible just to injure him. Once it's fired, the shot will be lethal."
* * *
The door was shut.
Brown, maybe oak, several scratches around the lock, a set of keys that scraped the door a little each time a key was turned twice in the stiff barrel. Mariana Hermansson knocked lightly on the door.
No footsteps, no voice-if anyone was in there they didn't move, or say anything, it was someone who didn't want to make contact.
On Ewert's order she had gone to look for the prison doctor on the other side of the large prison, inside the same walls, but several hundred meters away from the workshop and Hoffmann and the risk of more death. In Block C, through one of the hospital unit's small windows, she had watched a prisoner coughing in bed while a man in a white coat explained to her that 0913 Hoffmann had never been in any of the beds, that the symptoms of an epidemic had never been identified and that isolation had therefore never been ordered.
Ewert Grens had come up against a lie. The chief warden had prevented him from questioning an inmate. And right now that prisoner was holding a gun to a principal officer's head.
She knocked again, harder.
She pressed the handle down.
The door was unlocked.
Lennart Oscarsson was sitting in a dark leather armchair, his elbows on the wide desk in front, his head in his hands. His breathing was labored, deep and irregular, and she could see his forehead and cheeks shining in the harsh ceiling light; it could be sweat, it could be tears. He hadn't even noticed her coming into his office, that she was now standing only a few meters from him.
"Mariana Hermansson, City Police."
He jumped.
"I'd like to ask a few questions, about Hoffmann."
He looked at her.
"He is a dead man."
She chose to stay where she was.
"He said that."
His eyes were evasive-she tried to catch them, but couldn't, they were always somewhere else.
"He is a dead man. He said that!"
She didn't know what she had expected. But it wasn't this. Someone who was on the verge.
"His name is Martin. Did you know that? One of my best friends. No, more than that, my closest friend. The oldest employee at Aspsås. Forty years. He's been here forty years! And now… now he's going to die." She pursued the darting eyes.
"Yesterday, Ewert Grens, a detective superintendent who is in fact leading the operation right now from the church tower, was here. He came to question one of the prisoners. Piet Hoffmann."
The square monitor.
"If Martin dies…"
The mouth that moved so slowly.
"If he dies…"
He is a dead man.
"I don't know if-"
"You said that it wasn't possible. That Hoffmann was ill. That he was in isolation in the hospital unit."
"-I don't know that I could bear that."
Lennart Oscarsson hadn't heard her.
"I have just been to Block C. I spoke to Nycander. Hoffmann was never there."
The mouth.
&nbs
p; "You lied."
Moving.
"You lied. Why?"
When it moves slowly on that monitor, it looks like it's talking about death.
"Oscarsson! Listen to me! A person is lying dead on the floor in one of the corridors in Block B. Two other people have exactly nine minutes left to live. We need to make a decision. We need your answer!"
"Would you like a cup of coffee?"
"Why did you lie? What is this all about?"
"Or tea?"
"Who is Hoffmann?"
"I've got green and red and normal tea in bags. The sort that you dunk."
Large drops of sweat fell from the governor's face onto the shiny desktop when he got up and walked over to a glass and gold-frame cart stacked with porcelain cups and saucers in the corner of the room.
"We need an answer. Why? Why did you lie?"
"It's important not to leave it in too long."
He didn't look at her, didn't turn round despite the fact that she had raised her voice for the first time. He held one of the cups under the thermos and filled it with steaming water, then carefully dropped a bag with a picture of a red rosehip attached into the middle.
"About two minutes. No more."
She was losing him.
"Would you like milk?"
They needed him.
"Sugar? Both perhaps?"
Hermansson put her hand under her jacket, angled her gun so that it slipped out of its holster, stretched out her arm in front of the chief warden's face, recoil operation: the shot hit the middle of the rectangular cupboard door.
The bullet went straight through, hitting the back wall, and they heard it falling to the floor among the black and brown shoes.
Lennart Oscarsson didn't move. The warm cup of tea still in one hand. She pointed to the wall clock behind the desk with the muzzle of her gun.
"Eight more minutes. Do you hear? I want to know why you lied. And I want to know who Hoffmann is, why he's standing in the workshop window with a revolver to the hostage's head."
Three Seconds Page 33