Three Seconds

by Anders Roslund; Börge Hellström

  He was speeding and slammed his foot on the brake when the turn to Aspsås emerged from the dark.

  A couple more kilometers; he wasn't laughing yet, but he was smiling.

  Sunday was only a few hours old. He didn't have much time but he would manage, still more than twenty-four hours left until Monday morning, when the security company's report of the weekend's surveillance tapes was passed on to the Government Offices' security department.

  He had heard the voices, and now he had seen pictures as well.

  He would shortly confirm the connection between three of the meeting participants and the orders that a prison chief warden had been given before and during a hostage drama that ended in death.

  A terraced house on a terraced house road in a terraced house area.

  Ewert Grens parked the car in front of a mailbox with the number fifteen on it and then sat there and looked at the silence. He had never liked places like this. People who lived too close to each other and tried to look alike. In his big apartment in Sveagatan, he had someone walking on his ceiling and someone else standing under his floor and others who drank glasses of water on the other side of the kitchen wall, but he didn't see them, didn't know them; he heard them sometimes but he didn't know what they were wearing, what kind of car they had, didn't have to meet them in their dressing gown with the newspaper under their arm and didn't need to think about whether their plum tree was hanging a little too low over the fence.

  He could hardly stand himself.

  So how the hell was he going to stand the smell of barbecued meat and the sound of footballs on wooden doors?

  He would ask Sven later, when this was all over, how you do it, how you talk to people you're not interested in.

  He opened the door and got out into an almost balmy spring night. A couple of hundred meters away stood the high wall, a sharp line against the sky that refused to go dark and would continue to do so until yet another summer had turned into early autumn.

  Square slabs in a well-trimmed lawn. He walked up to the door and looked at the windows that were lit both downstairs and up: probably the kitchen, probably the bedroom. Lennart Oscarsson lived the other side of his life only a few minutes' walk from his workplace. Grens was sure that being able to cope with living in a terraced house was somehow connected CO not needing to separate one reality from the other.

  His intention was to surprise. He hadn't phoned to say he was coming, had hoped to meet someone who had just been asleep and therefore didn't have the energy to protest.

  It wasn't like that.

  "You?"

  He remembered Hermansson's description of a person on the edge. "What do you want?"

  Oscarsson was wearing the prison uniform.

  "So you're still working?"

  "Sorry?"

  "Your clothes."

  Oscarsson sighed.

  "In that case I'm not alone. Unless you've come here in the middle of the night to have some tea and help me with the crossword?"

  "Will you let me in? Or do you want to stand out here and talk?"

  Pine floors, pine stairs, plain walls. He guessed that the prison chief warden had done up the hall by himself. The kitchen felt older: cupboards and counters from the eighties, pastel colors that you couldn't buy anymore.

  "Do you live here on your own?"

  "These days."

  Ewert Grens knew only too well how a home sometimes refuses to be changed and a person who has moved out somehow seems to stay in the colors and furniture.

  "Thirsty?"

  "No."

  "Then I'll have a drink myself."

  Lennart Oscarsson opened the fridge, neat and well stocked, vegetables at the bottom, the beer bottle that he was now holding in his hand from the top shelf.

  "You nearly lost a good friend yesterday."

  The warden sat down and took a swig without answering.

  "I went to see him this morning. Danderyd hospital. He's shaken." "I know. I've spoken to him as well. Twice."

  "How does it feel?"

  "Feel?"

  "To know that you're to blame."

  The guilt. Grens knew everything about that too.

  "It's half past one in the morning. I'm still in my uniform in my own kitchen. And you wonder how it feels?"

  "Because that's right, isn't it? You're to blame?"

  Oscarsson threw up his hands.

  "Grens, I know what you're after."

  Ewert Grens looked at another man who wasn't going to get to bed tonight either.

  "You spoke to one of my colleagues about thirty-six hours ago. You admitted that you had made at least four decisions that had forced Hoffmann to act as he did."

  Lennart Oscarsson was red in the face.

  "I know what you're after!"

  "Who?"

  The chief warden jumped up, poured out what was left in the bottle, then threw it against the wall and waited until the last shard of glass was still. He unbuttoned his uniform jacket, put it on the now empty kitchen table, fetched big scissors from the cutlery drawer. With great care he straightened out one of the sleeves, stroked the material with the back of his hand until he was sure it was flat and then started to cut, quite a large piece, five, maybe six centimeters wide.

  "Who gave you the orders?"

  He held the first piece of material in his hand, felt the frayed edge. He smiled, Grens was convinced of it, an almost shy smile.

  "Oscarsson, who?"

  He cut as he had done before, straight, considerate lines, the rectangular pieces neatly on top of the first.

  "Stefan Lygis. A prisoner you were responsible for. A prisoner who is now dead."

  "It wasn't my fault."

  "Pawel Murawski. Piet Hoffmann. Two other prisoners you were responsible for. Two other prisoners who are now dead."

  "It wasn't my fault."

  "Martin Jacobson. A-"

  "All right, that's enough."

  "Martin Jacobson, a prison warden who-"

  "For Christ's sake, Grens, that's enough!"

  The first arm was ready. Pieces of material stacked in a small pile. Oscarsson pulled out the next one, shook it lightly, a crease more or less in the middle, hand backwards and forward across it until it disappeared.

  "Pål Larsen."

  He cut again, faster now.

  "General Director Pål Larsen ordered me."

  Grens remembered, about half an hour into the recording, a trouser leg scraping against the microphone as it stretched, and the sound of a teaspoon against porcelain when someone had taken a sip from a coffee cup.

  "I appointed you. And that means that you decide what happens in the Prison and Probation Service."

  A short pause while the state secretary left the room to get the head of the Prison and Probation Service who had been sitting waiting outside in the corridor.

  "You decide what you and I agree that you should decide."

  The general director had been given an order. The general director had passed that order on. From the real sender.

  Ewert Grens looked at a bare-torsoed man who was cutting to pieces the uniform that he had longed for all his adult life, and he hurried out of the kitchen that would never change color and the home that was even lonelier than his own.

  "Do you know what I'm going to do with these?"

  Lennart Oscarsson stood in the open doorway as Grens got into his car. The recently shredded pieces in his raised hands, he dropped a couple and they fell slowly to the ground.

  "Wash the car, Grens. You know, you always need clean bits when you're polishing, and this, this is damn expensive material."

  He dialed the number as the car rolled out of the silent rows of terraced houses. He looked at the church and the square church tower, at the prison and the workshop that could be seen behind the high wall.

  Not even thirty-six hours had passed. It would haunt him For the rest of his life.

  "Hello?"

  Göransson had been awake.

  "Di
fficulties sleeping?"

  "What do you want, Ewert?"

  "You and me to have a meeting. In about half an hour."

  "I don't think so."

  "A meeting. In your office. In your capacity as CHIS controller." "Tomorrow."

  Grens looked at the sign in his rearview mirror; it was hard to read in the dark but he knew what the town he had just left was called.

  He hoped it would be a while before he had to return.

  "Paula."

  "Excuse me?"

  "That's what we're going to talk about."

  He waited, there was a long silence.

  "Paula who?"

  He didn't answer. The forest transformed slowly into high-rise blocks-he was getting close to Stockholm.

  "Grens, answer me. Paula who?"

  Ewert Grens just held his handset for a while, then hung up.

  The corridor was empty. The coffee machine hummed, hidden by the dark. He settled on one of the chairs outside Göransson's office.

  His boss would soon be there. Grens was convinced of it.

  He drank the vending machine coffee.

  Wilson was Hoffmann's handler. A handler records the informant's work in a logbook. The logbook is kept in a safe by the CHIS controller. Göransson.

  "Grens."

  The chief superintendent opened the door to his office. Ewert Grens looked at the clock and smiled. Exactly half an hour since their conversation. He was shown into an office that was considerably larger than his own and sat down in a leather armchair, wriggled a bit.

  Göransson was nervous.

  He was trying hard to pretend the opposite, but Grens recognized the breathing, the pitch, the slightly exaggerated movements.

  "The logbook, Göransson. I want to see it."

  "I don't understand."

  Grens was furious but hadn't thought of showing it.

  He didn't shout, he didn't threaten.

  Not yet.

  "Give me the logbook. The whole file."

  Göransson was sitting on the edge of the desk. He waved at two walls of shelves, files on every shelf.

  "Which goddamn file?"

  "The file of the person I murdered."

  "I have no idea what you're talking about."

  "The snitch file."

  "What do you want it for?"

  I am going to nail you, you bastard. I've got a day to do it.

  "You know."

  "What I know, Ewert, is that there is only one copy of it, and it's in my safe, which only I have the code to, and there's a reason for that."

  Göransson gave a light kick to the safe, which was green and stood against the wall behind his desk.

  As no unauthorized persons can see it."

  Grens breathed slowly. He had been about to strike out, balled fist that was halfway to Göransson's face when he caught it, the desire was so strong.

  He released his cramping fingers, held them out, an exaggerated gesture perhaps.

  "The file, Göransson. And I'll need a pen."

  Göransson looked at the hand in front of him, the gnarled fingers. An Ewert Grens who shouts, who threatens, I can deal with that. "Can I have it?"

  "'What?"

  "The pen."

  But the loud whispering.

  "And a piece of paper."

  "Ewert?"

  "A piece of paper."

  The gnarled fingers pointing at him.

  He gave them a notebook and a pen, a red felt tip.

  "You got a name from me half an hour ago. I know that that name is in the informant file. I want to see it."

  He knows.

  Ewert Grens held the notebook against the armrest of the leather chair and wrote something. Handwriting that was normally difficult to read. But nor now. Five carefully written letters in red felt tip.

  Grens knows.

  Göransson went over to the safe, maybe his hands were shaking, maybe that was why it took so long to set the six digits, to open the heavy door, to take out a black, rectangular file.

  `Are all the meetings between your handler and this Hoffmann recorded here?"

  “Yes.”

  “And this is the only copy?"

  "It's the copy that I keep as CHIS controller. The only one."

  "Destroy it."

  He put the black folder down in front of him on the desk and looked through the code names of criminals who were recruited to work as informants for the Swedish police. He had gotten halfway when he stopped.

  I knew it was wrong and I said so.

  "Grens?"

  "Yes?"

  I left her room.

  "It's here. The name you're looking for."

  Ewert Grens had already got up and was standing behind his boss, reading over his shoulder, tightly written pages.

  First the code name. Then the date. Then a summary of that day's short meeting in a flat that could be entered from two different addresses.

  Page after page, meeting after meeting.

  "You know what I want."

  I got out.

  You can't have it.

  "Give me the envelope, Göransson. Give it to me."

  With every logbook came an envelope with the informant's real name, sealed by the handler on the first day of the operation, a wax seal, red and shiny.

  "Open it."

  I can walk out of this with my head held high.

  "I can't do that."

  "Now, Göransson."

  Grens clutched the envelope in his hand, read the name that he had heard spoken for the first time only days ago, on a recording of a meeting in an office in the Government Offices.

  Five letters.

  The same name that he had just written on a note pad.

  P-a-u-l-a.

  He reached over for Göransson's letter opener, broke the seal and opened the brown envelope.

  He knew it already.

  But still the damned thumping in his chest.

  Ewert Grens pulled out the piece of paper and read the name that he knew would be there. Confirmation that the person he had ordered to be shot really had worked for the city police.

  Piet Hoffmann.

  Piet.

  Paula.

  The Swedish code name system, first letter of a man's name became the first letter of a woman's name. The informant file was full of snitches called Maria, Lena, Birgitta.

  'And now I want the secret intelligence report. About what actually happened at Västmannagatan 79."

  The whispering again.

  Göransson looked at the colleague he had never liked.

  He knows.

  "You can't have it."

  "Where do you keep the secret intelligence report? What actually happened at Västmannagatan 79? That those of us investigating were not to know?"

  "It's not here."

  "Where?"

  "There's only one copy."

  "Jesus, Göransson, where?"

  He knows.

  "The county police commissioner has it. Our most senior officer."

  He limped badly, it wasn't the pain-it was years since he'd bothered about that-this was just how he walked, left foot light on the floor, right foot heavy on the floor, left leg light on the floor. But with anger as his motor, he thumped his right leg down harder on the surface and the monotonous sound was quickly carried by the walls in the unlit corridor. The elevator down four floors, right toward the escalator, through the canteen, elevator five floors up. Then that sound again, someone limping down the last stretch of corridor who stopped outside the door of the county police commissioner's office.

  He stood still, listened.

  He pressed down the handle.

  It was locked.

  Ewert Grens had stopped in his travels three times: first at the data support office and one of the Coke-drinking young men to collect a CD with a surprisingly simple and accessible program that could open all code words on all computers in two minutes; then at the small kitchen opposite the vending machine for a towel; and finally the
maintenance office opposite the stores for a hammer and a screwdriver.

  He wound the towel around the hammer several times, positioned the screwdriver in the gap between the upper door hinge and the pin, looked around in the dark one more time and came down hard on the screwdriver with the hammer until the pin was loose. He moved the screwdriver down to the lower hinge and the next pin, until the hammer blows released it. From there it was easy to separate the two hinges, to carefully rock the screwdriver back and forth between the door and the doorframe, to push the door back until the lock barrel slid out of its fixture.

  He lifted the door and put it to one side.

  It was lighter than he had imagined.

  He had forced other doors during raids-a heart attack on the other side, scared children on their own-in order to avoid waiting for a locksmith who might never come.

  But he had never broken into a senior police officer's room before.

  The laptop was on the desk, just like his own. He started it, waited while the CD program identified and replaced the code words and then searched the documents as he had learned to do.

  A couple of minutes was all he needed.

  Ewert Grens re-hung the door on its hinges, coaxed the pins back in, checked that there were no scratches or splinters on the doorframe, and then walked away with the computer in a briefcase.

  * * *

  The alarm clock behind the telephone didn't work. It had stopped at a quarter to four. Grens focused on the white clock while he phoned the talking clock for the second time that night.

  Three forty-five and thirty seconds. Precisely. It was working. The night was receding without him having noticed.

  He was sweaty. He unwound the towel from the hammer and wiped his forehead and neck. Walking through the building, forcing open a door, more exercise than he was used to.

  He sat down at the computer that had until recently been on another desk, searched for the file he had started to read earlier.