He removed the headphones and put them on Sven's head.
"Listen."
Sven Sundkvist had analyzed the recording from Emergency Services on the ninth of May at 12:37:50 as many times as Ewert.
And now listen to this."
The voice had been stored in one of the computer's sound files. They had both encountered it when they were waiting in a churchyard twenty-four hours ago.
"He's a dead man in three minutes."
The one whispered dead and the other screamed dead, but when Ewert Grens and Sven Sundkvist listened carefully and compared the pronunciation of the d and the e and the a, it was obvious.
It was the same voice.
"It's him."
"It sure as hell is him, Sven! It was Hoffmann who was in the apartment! It was Hoffmann who raised the alarm!"
Grens was already on his way out of the room.
Wojtek is the Polish mafia.
Hoffmann Security AB is linked to Wojtek.
The car was parked on Bergsgatan and he hurried down the stairs, even though the elevator was empty.
So why did you raise the alarm?
So why did you shoot another member in solitary confinement and blow a third member up?
He turned out of Bergsgatan and drove down Hantverkargatan toward the city. He was going to visit the person whose death he was responsible for.
He stopped the car in a bus lane outside the door to Vasagatan 42. A couple of minutes, then Nils Krantz knocked on the window. "Anything in particular?"
"I don't know yet. It just feels right. An hour maybe, I have to think." "Here, keep them for the moment. I'll let you know if I need them." Krantz gave him a set of keys and Ewert Grens put it in the inner pocket of his jacket.
"By the way, Ewert…"
The forensic scientist had stopped a bit farther down the pavement.
"I've identified the two explosives. Pentyl and nitroglycerine. It was the pentyl that caused the actual explosion, the wave that forced out the window and the heat that ignited the diesel. And the nitroglycerine had been applied directly onto someone's skin-I don't know whose yet, though."
Grens went up the stairs of one of the many buildings in central Stockholm from the turn of the century, the first few years of the 1900s when the cityscape changed dramatically.
He stopped in front of a door on the first floor.
Hoffmann Security AB. Same old trick. A security firm as a front for the Eastern European mafia.
He opened the door with the keys that he'd got from Krantz.
A beautiful apartment, shining parquet floor, high ceilings, white walls. He looked out of the window with a view of Kungsbron and the Vasa theatre, an elderly couple on their way in to the evening performance, as he had often thought of doing himself, but never gotten around to.
You were sent up for a drug crime. But you weren't an amphetamine dealer. He walked down the hall and went into what must once have been the drawing room, but was now an office with two gun cabinets by an open fireplace.
You had links with Wojtek. But you were not a member of the mafia.
He sat down in the chair by the desk that he guessed Hoffmann must have sat in.
You were someone else.
He got up again and wandered around the apartment, looked in the two empty gun cabinets, touched the deactivated alarm, rinsed out some dirty glasses.
Who?
When he left Hoffmann Security AB, Grens had gone to look at the storage spaces that belonged to the apartment. He had opened a storeroom in the cellar with a strong smell of damp, and he had walked around in the loft with a fan heater whirring above his head while he looked for a storeroom that was more or less empty, except for a hammer and chisel that were lying on top of a pile of old tires.
It was late, and he should perhaps have driven the kilometer from the door on Vasagatan to his own flat on Sveavägen, but the anger and restlessness pushed back the tiredness-he wouldn't sleep tonight either.
The corridor of the homicide unit was waiting, abandoned. His colleagues would rather spend the first summer evenings with a glass of wine at one of the outside cafes on Kungsholmen followed by a slow walk home, than with twenty-four parallel investigations and unpaid overtime in a characterless office. He didn't feel left out, didn't miss it. He had chosen long ago not to take part and your own choice can never become ugly loneliness. This evening it would be a report on a shooting in a prison and tomorrow evening it would be a report on another shooting. There was always an investigation that was a trauma for the person who was shot, bat for the investigator generated a vicarious sense of belonging. Grens was almost at the coffee machine and two plastic cups of blackness when he stopped by his pigeonhole and saw a large padded envelope in the pile of unopened letters; too many damn reference lists and soulless mass mailings. He pulled it out and weighed it in his hand-not particularly heavy-turned it over without seeing any sender. His name and address were easy to read, a man's handwriting, he was sure of that, something square, unrhythmical, almost sharp about it, possibly in felt pen.
Ewert Grens put the envelope down in the middle of the desk and stared at it while he emptied the first cup. Sometimes you just get a feeling, impossible to explain. He opened a drawer and a bag with unused rubber gloves, put on a pair and opened the end of the envelope with his index finger. He peeped cautiously in. No letter, no accompanying text or paper.
He counted five things, took them out one at a time and placed them in a row in front of him, between the files of ongoing investigations.
Half a plastic cup of coffee more.
He started from the left. Three passports. Red with gold letters. EUROPEAN UNION, SWEDEN, PASSPORT. All Swedish, genuine, issued by the police authority in Stockholm.
The photographs had been taken in a normal photo booth.
A few centimeters in size, black and white, slightly blurred, small reflections in the shining eyes.
The same face three times. Different names, different ID numbers. The face of a dead person.
Pier Hoffmann.
Grens leaned back in his chair and looked over at the window and the light outside, dim street lights that guarded the straight, empty asphalt paths of the inner courtyard at Kronoberg.
If this is you.
He picked up the envelope, turned it around.
If this has come from you.
He held it closer, fingertips brushed lightly over the front. There were no stamps. But there was something that looked like a postmark in the top right-hand corner. He studied it for a long time. Difficult to read, half the letters had disappeared. FRANKFURT. He was more or less certain. And six numbers. 234212. Then a kind of symbol, maybe a bird, or a plane.
The rest was mainly streaks that had seen too much water.
Grens scoured his desk drawer and the telephone list that he found there in a plastic sleeve. Horst Bauer, Bundeskriminalamt, Wiesbaden. He liked the German detective superintendent with whom he had worked a few years ago on an investigation in connection with a busload of abandoned Romanian children. Bauer was at home and having dinner, but was friendly and helpful and while Ewert waited and his food got cold, made three phone calls to confirm that the envelope that had recently arrived in a pigeonhole at the City Police in Stockholm had probably been sent by a courier company with offices at Frankfurt am Main International Airport.
Grens thanked him and hung up.
One of the world's largest airports.
He gave a deep sigh.
If it's you. If this comes from you. You instructed someone to send it for you. After your death.
Two more objects on the desk. The first wasn't even a centimeter big. He held it in his clumsy rubber fingers. A receiver, a silver earpiece, electronic devices for listening to conversations that were caught by transmitters of the same size.
Dear God.
It wasn't even twelve hours since Sven had held such a transmitter in his hand, attached to a black wire and a solar cell painted in t
he same color. The church tower's fragile railing.
Fifteen hundred and three meters from the now blown-out workshop window.
Ewert Grens stretched up to the shelf behind the desk and the plastic bag that had not yet been recorded in any chain of custody list or delivered to forensics. He emptied the contents out of the bag, called one of the few numbers he knew by heart and put the receiver down on the desk so that the talking clock voice was close to the transmitter. He then left the room and closed the door while he held the silver receiver to his ear and listened to the clock striking at ten-second intervals.
It worked.
The receiver that he had just been sent in an envelope was set at exactly the same frequency as the transmitter they had found on the tower railing. One thing left. A CD.
Grens balanced the shiny disk on his hand. No text on either side, nothing to give away the content.
He pushed it into the narrow opening in the short end of his computer tower.
"Government Offices, Tuesday, tenth of May."
It was the same voice.
He had listened to it together with Sven only a couple of hours ago. The voice that had raised the alarm. The voice that had threatened. Hoffmann.
Grens swallowed the last drops in the plastic cup. A third?
Later. He read the numbers on the sound file. Seventy-eight minutes and thirty-four seconds.
When I've listened to this.
* * *
The third cup of coffee from the machine was on the desk.
Ewert Grens had gone to get it but didn't need it. The racing in his chest that was making him dizzy had nothing to do with caffeine.
A legal police operation had just become legitimized murder.
He listened again.
First of all, scraping sounds, someone walking, fabric rubbing against a microphone with every step. After eleven minutes and forty-seven seconds-he checked on the sound file timer-a couple of voices, muffled. The microphone had been low, leg height, and it was obvious that Hoffmann moved every now and then to get closer to the sound source, had slowly stretched out a leg toward the person talking, suddenly got up and stood right next to them.
"The document… I've read it. I assumed… I assumed that it concerned a … woman?"
The only voice he hadn't heard before.
A woman, forty, maybe fifty years old. A soft voice with harsh sentences, he was sure he would recognize it if he heard it again.
"Paula. That's my name, in here."
The clearest voice.
The person with the microphone.
Hoffmann. But he called himself Paula. A code name.
"We have to make him more dangerous… He will have committed some serious crimes. He'll be given a long sentence."
The third voice.
Quite a high voice, the sort that doesn't fit the face, a colleague from the same corridor, only a few doors down and someone who had just happened to be passing on one of the first days of the investigation and had wanted to know how it was going and to give some ideas that pointed in the wrong direction.
Ewert Grens slammed his hand down on the desk, hard.
Erik Wilson.
He hit the desk again, with both hands this time, swore loudly at the cold office walls that just stood there.
Two more voices.
The two he knew best, part of a hierarchical chain of command, links between a criminal and a government office.
"Paula doesn’t have time for Västmannagatan."
A sharp, nasal voice, a bit too loud.
The national police commissioner.
"You've dealt with similar cases before."
A deep, resonant voice, that didn't swallow its words, but held them, vowels that were prolonged.
Göransson.
Ewert Grens stopped the recording and in one go drank the coffee that was still too hot and burned its way down from his throat to his stomach. He didn't feel it-.warm, cold, he was shaking as he had been since he listened to it the first time and was about to go back out into the corridor and pour more of the heat into himself until he managed to feel something other than the throttling rage.
A meeting at Rosenbad.
He took a felt pen from the pen holder and drew a rectangle and five circles straight onto the blotter.
A meeting table with five heads.
One who was probably a state secretary from the Ministry of Justice. One who called himself Paula. One who functioned as Paula's handler. One who was the most senior police officer in the country. And one, he looked at the circle that represented Göransson, who was Ewert Grens's immediate line manager and Erik Wilson's line manager and responsible for both their workloads and had therefore known all along why there were no answers in the Västmannagatan 79 case.
"I am a useful idiot."
Ewert Grens picked up the vandalized blotter and threw it to the floor. "I am a bloody useful idiot."
He pressed play again, sentences that he had already heard.
"Paula. That's my name, in here."
You weren't the mafia. You were one of us. You were employed by us to pretend you were the mafia.
And I murdered you.
* * *
Sunday
* * *
The big clock on Kungsholms church struck half past midnight when Ewert Grens left his office and the police headquarters and drove the short distance to Rosenbad. It was a lovely, warm night, but he didn't notice. He knew what had happened at Västmannagatan 79. He knew why Pier Hoffmann had done time at Aspsås prison. And he suspected why the exact same people who had arranged for Hoffmann's prison sentence had suddenly been there, searching for a bureaucratic reason for killing him.
Piet Hoffmann was dangerous.
Piet Hoffmann knew the truth about a murder that was less important than continued infiltration.
When Grens identified Hoffmann's name on the periphery of the investigation and wanted to question him, he became even more dangerous.
They had burned him.
But he had survived an attack, taken hostages, and positioned himself where he was visible in a workshop window.
You recorded the meeting. You sent it to me. The man who had to decide on your death.
Ewert Grens parked on Fredsgatan close to the dark building from where Sweden was governed. He would soon make his way in there. He had just listened to a meeting that had been recorded in one of its many senior offices twenty-one days ago.
He got out his mobile phone and dialed Sven Sundkvist's number. Three rings. Someone coughed and struggled to find strength.
"Hello?"
"Sven, it's me. I want-"
"Ewert, I'm asleep. I've been asleep since eight. We missed out on last night, remember?"
"You're not going to get much more sleep tonight either. You're going to go to the USA, to south Georgia. Your plane leaves Arlanda in two and half hours. You'll arrive-"
"Ewert."
Sven had pulled himself up, his voice was stronger-it was probably easier to talk when your chest and airways were free of pillows and duvets. "What are you talking about?"
"I want you to get up and get dressed, Sven. You're going to meet Erik Wilson and you're going to get him to confirm that a meeting I've now listened to actually rook place. I'll call you in a couple of hours. By that time, you'll be sitting in a taxi and you'll have listened to the sound file that I've forwarded to your computer. You'll understand exactly what this is all about."
Grens cut the engine and got out of the car.
The doors to power were made of glass and had opened automatically whenever he had been there during the day. Now they remained closed and he had to press a bell to wake the security guard one floor up.
"Yes?"
"Detective Superintendent Grens, City Police. I'm here to look at some of your surveillance camera footage."
"Now?"
"Do you have anything else to do?"
Some rustling papers near the microphone made the spea
ker crackle. "Did you say Grens?"
"You can see me in the camera. And now you can see the ID that I'm holding up."
"No one said you were coming. I want to see it again properly when you're in here with me. Then I'll decide whether you can stay or whether I'd rather you came back tomorrow."
Ewert Grens accelerated, the E18 north of Roslagstull was almost empty and right now he didn't give a damn about signs that limited the speed to seventy kilometers an hour.
He had first checked the security company's signing-in book.
The state secretary of the Ministry of Justice had had a total of four visitors on the tenth of May. They had arrived separately within twenty-five minutes of each other. First the national police commissioner, then Göransson, a bit later Erik Wilson, and finally, in handwriting that was difficult to read, Grens and the security man were eventually convinced that the visitor who had signed in at 15:36 was Pier Hoffmann.
He passed Danderyd, Taby, Vallentuna… for the third time in twenty-four hours he was approaching the small town of Aspsås, but he wasn't going to the prison or the church, he was going to a terraced house and a man he would not leave until he had answered the one question that Grens had come to ask.
With the signing-in book in his hand, Ewert Grens had demanded to see footage from two of the cameras that watched over the Government Offices and every person passing in or out. He had identified them one by one. First when they signed in, the camera was above the security desk in the entrance to Rosenbad and they stood there, all four of them, without looking up. Then a camera at face level in a corridor on the second floor opposite the door to the state secretary's office. He had seen the national police commissioner and Göransson knock on the door and go in, within a couple of minutes of each other. Wilson had arrived twenty minutes later and Hoffmann had sauntered down the corridor about seven minutes after that. He had known exactly where the camera was and twigged it early, looked into it for a bit too long, looked into the lens aware that his presence had been documented.
Piet Hoffmann had knocked on the door just like all the others but had not been let in immediately like them. He was instructed to stay in the corridor, to hold out his arms while Göransson frisked him. Grens found it hard to stand still when he realized that the loud noise he had heard about nine minutes into the recording was the chief superintendent's hand knocking the microphone.
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