“Launch operation . . .” The brigadier general’s voice had changed in character, a shade more seriousness. “. . . now.”
And then it all happened fast. The combat boats started their engines and drove at full speed from the dock toward the light. Toward the motor boats. At the boats.
Two of the three combat boats—with soldiers now strapped into safety harnesses—aimed straight for the transport boats, rammed them, and the armed and surprised crew was thrown violently against the deck and the railings. Soon the Special Ops soldiers were out of their harnesses, boarding, seizing control. Disarming them. Without having fired a single shot.
At the same time, the third combat boat steered toward the mini-submarine and was halfway there when the now open hatch exploded with the sound of machine-gun fire. A few seconds and a hundred shots. Then silence returned, as suddenly as it had been shattered. And Sundkvist tried to locate where that single shot, at the same time and with a different weapon, had originated from. Probably from behind him. From the woods.
A sniper. And that single bullet had knocked out one of two crewmen.
“Ten seconds!”
The voice was loud and piercing over open water and belonged to the soldier who sat at the front, in the bow, and who was the first to climb onto the submarine. He also thrust his weapon into the hatch.
“You’ve got ten seconds to surrender!”
It was difficult now to make out from land what exactly was happening, the reflection of the bright lights gleaming uneasily against the water hindered visibility.
“Five seconds!”
Sundkvist looked away after a while, it was so much easier to listen.
“Three, two, one . . .”
Then hushed voices, all at once. And Sundkvist turned his eyes back again to see that the bright lights were now still, and the transport boats out of the way. A man in his thirties, probably South American, climbed up the submarine’s ladder and stepped out onto the deck with both hands in the air—and if his binoculars could have given him a close enough view, Sundkvist would have seen how the smuggler was bleeding from both ears. The shock wave. From the underwater mines. The eardrums always burst.
He handed the binoculars to Ågestam, and it looked as if the chief prosecutor was smiling. Flaming red cheeks, his blond bangs standing almost straight up, and even the occasional bead of sweat on his forehead—Sundkvist had never seen the prosecutor this excited.
“The seizure protocol?” His arms waved like batons when he was eager. “Sven, you have prepared it, right?”
Without waiting for a reply, he ran out of the small fishing cabin and into the darkness over the bare rocks toward the dock and the military boats that were returning with the mini-sub trailing a coarse rope. The captive was freezing as he was lifted, or rather pushed, onto the dock in handcuffs, and he looked as exhausted as you would be if you’d just spent several days far below sea level. Ågestam would question him later—but for now he continued just as eagerly toward the submarine flopping on the surface of the water like an upside-down whale. It wasn’t that far from the somewhat high dock to the submarine, and he took a running jump. And fell. His shiny dress shoes slipped as he landed on the submarine’s slippery surface, and he fell headlong into the icy water. Sundkvist had just reached the dock and threw himself onto his stomach. Ågestam thrust one hand into his and latched the other one onto the dock and heaved himself up slowly. The water streamed off his otherwise proper and dapper suit. But he didn’t seem to mind. He said thanks for the help, stood up, and took aim at the submarine, jumping again. This time he made it all the way, grabbed hold of the turret and the open door, and fell down on his knees to peer into the hole toward the submarine’s interior. Toward the cabin—so limited, so primitive, yet functional. Toward the cargo space—and one of the most astonishing sights the prosecutor had ever seen.
Rectangular, taped-up, plastic-wrapped packages. Stacked from floor to ceiling. Everywhere. Tightly packed.
“Plastic-wrapped small units. It’s all here. The tip was correct!” He shouted, his shrill voice swallowed in part by the interior of the sub. “You hear that, Sven? One ton! A thousand kilos! That will never reach consumers. Because the load is hereby confiscated. And listen—after the seizure protocol I want this counted and photographed. Every single little package!”
Then he climbed down, sliding his wet, suit-clad body through the round hole. And Sundkvist called after him.
“Absolutely. Every single little package. A good tip, right? And in two days it will be followed by another good tip. A new giant seizure.”
The chief prosecutor’s head had just disappeared through the hole. But it popped up again. Head, eyes, and nose over the edge. “What do you mean, Sven?”
“At Arlanda airport. If you’re there in two days, you’ll get the next tip. I’ll give you more details later.” Sundkvist didn’t say anything else. This was exactly what Grens had instructed him to reveal. And he did what the detective superintendent wanted—even though he didn’t understand why. Then he left Ågestam and the mini-submarine and the dock, and headed a bit up the beach into the darkness, making sure he was out of earshot. He now needed to make one more call, also as directed by Grens.
Five rings. Then his supervisor’s voice.
“This is Erik Wilson.”
“It’s Sven.”
“Yes?”
“The crackdown I informed you about—it went as planned. The biggest ever in Sweden. But there was a small piece of information I left out. This tip came from a familiar source.”
“Familiar source?”
“Yes. The tip came from within the organization. From someone who infiltrated almost all the way to the top on behalf of the American authorities.”
Wilson cleared his throat, let out air from the bottom of his belly before he answered. As if he wanted to be sure that his voice would remain steady. “How do you know that?”
“Grens told me when he passed on the info. And he made it very clear that I was supposed to communicate to you that Haraldsson was doing his job excellently.”
That voice. It wasn’t so steady anymore. And Wilson wasn’t trying to hide it. “You said doing? As in doing right now? As in . . . he’s still alive?”
“Yes.”
Sundkvist could hear the silence churning. Transforming from an inner chaos, to confusion, then to relief. As the inconceivable became conceivable.
“Grens wanted me to tell you this too. Those who are dead can be resurrected. Others have before him. And people believe. He hoped therefore that the commissioner would believe this too.”
NIGHT. THREE THIRTY. The hour when the streets of Cali were at their most deserted, and which he’d been waiting for. Time for his final trip through a city that had never become anything more than a refuge.
Piet Hoffmann was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs with Zofia in his lap, close to him.
The final trip as in the final night as in the final hours.
He no longer apologized, she’d chosen to follow him to Frankfurt and start a new life together, and she never demanded his guilt or his gratitude in exchange—she wasn’t like that, and they were in this together, trying to survive together.
“Home, Piet.”
While the boys slept, they’d packed the three suitcases that they had with them here. Fragments of some kind of existence. Now, she kissed him lightly on the mouth, twice.
“Whatever home is now.”
He didn’t answer.
“Piet?” Two more kisses. “Piet? Hey, are you . . .”
“Home? That’s wherever we are. Together.”
She held him, tightly. He wanted to hold her back, with equal strength. He would when this night was over, when they were on their way.
“But I have no fucking clue what it is I’m headed home to. More than a promise.”
She caressed his cheek, forehead, buried his face in her chest.
“I believe in that promise, Piet. When you�
�ve destroyed your reality like we’ve done, cut family ties, friendships, abandoned security, everything—then you have to believe in something. And I have decided to believe in a short prison sentence. Believe that the house we left, which Wilson says is still waiting for us, can become our home again. Because you, and I, and the children, we have to believe it.”
He loved her so. Sometimes it was physically painful to leave her. As if she’d moved into his body and he had no choice but to carry her with him, inside him.
“Piet?” She put her hands on either side of his face, lifted it up, her eyes weren’t accusatory, just worried. “What are you going to do?”
“Grab some things we left in the house. What little we want to take with us. A suitcase full of stuff.”
“What else are you going to do?”
She knew him too well.
“Nothing.”
“Piet?”
“One small errand on the way.”
“What?”
“I can’t say.”
“That’s not good enough for me.” She looked at him. That look that could see inside him.
“I’m going to make sure a man who destroys little angels can’t do it anymore.”
He stood up and took one last look at the control panel and the continual gaze of sixteen cameras on the monitor. No unknown objects, no abnormal movements.
“I don’t like you leaving here. Not tonight, Piet. We have so little time left. To risk it . . . there’s nothing we need from that house. And no angel, no matter what you’re up to, can be worth more than the two you’re already responsible for.”
One last kiss, two last kisses, then down the stairs, and out into the darkness. Warmer than usual, more humid, it was going to rain.
No one stood guard outside anymore, not on foot or in a car. That was how he’d arranged it, even though it put Zofia and the boys at risk. But when he’d weighed the alternatives, he’d decided it would be less dangerous to leave no traces.
Not much traffic. Just as he’d expected. The occasional car or moped, now and then a pedestrian. It was an easy drive, and he parked almost two blocks away, opened the trunk and took out a new, empty brown suitcase, which had been sitting there since the meeting at the industrial building outside Jamundí with a head chemist who could take away the smell.
His first errand. Their dark, abandoned house. Where he’d pack up a few belongings that he didn’t want to leave behind, which needed to be inside the suitcase in case some customs agent decided to search it.
A few minutes’ walk—he would never get used to how impenetrable the darkness was at night here—so little artificial lighting in comparison to the Stockholm he grew up and lived in. The house was just as dark. Hoffmann approached slowly, with full awareness of his surroundings, entering the small lawn from the direction of the parking lot—really the only way to approach since the back of the house was set against a high, ugly concrete wall. After exactly one and a half meters he stopped and took out a pencil-size flashlight, making sure to stand with his back to the house as he used the energetic ultraviolet light to search for the fluorescent thread. It wasn’t there. He squatted down and looked at the ground. There it lay. In two parts—something or someone had stepped down on it. A dog? A cat? Children playing? Or an enemy who shouldn’t be here?
Rapid but quiet steps to the front door, the key put gently into the lock, the handle pushed down. He listened. Nothing. The fan whistling from the toilet and the ticking of the clock on the dresser in the living room. He lit up the next checkpoint. The thin thread he’d strung up between the hallway and kitchen. It too was no longer intact—just like the one outside, it lay in two pieces at his feet.
Someone was, or had been, inside the house.
He sank down to the floor, crawled through the hall, and moved a rain jacket that hung from the rear shelf. A small cupboard was embedded behind it in the wall. He opened the door to a fifteen-by-fifteen-centimeter monitor, which displayed information from all of the house’s thermal cameras. Four buttons at the bottom—one of them was flashing red. Upstairs. Rasmus’s room.
Hoffmann pushed the button, choosing the image from that room. Pitch black, as it should be. Except there—at the bottom right corner.
A body, he was sure of it, radiating heat as red as the blinking light. And it looked as if it were lying on the floor, so it was difficult to determine whether it was large or small, animal or human.
He waited. Silence. One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes and thirty seconds. Then the red started to move. Stand up. A person, he could see that now. Short in stature. Headed out of Rasmus’s room. Onto the next image, the infrared camera that captured the upper hall and the stairs. Toward the ground floor. Toward him.
Hoffmann loosened his knife from its shoulder holster, grasped the wooden handle, index finger lightly against the two-sided blade. A last look at the screen. The red figure, the person, was holding something in his hand—something shadowy that created a dark splotch.
At the moment the red on the screen reached the end of the stairs, Hoffmann attacked.
Two steps forward, left hand grabbing hold of the intruder’s left shoulder and forcefully twisting his back to him, right hand on the intruder’s neck ready to cut it.
Then he froze. This was not a full-grown man. He lacked the power, weight, ability to fight. This was wrong—he knew with certainty as soon as he felt an undeveloped Adam’s apple.
He was about to cut the throat of a child.
“Drop the gun!” The knife pushed harder against the neck. “Drop the gun if you want to live!”
A dull thud as the gun fell to the floor. And a muffled bang as a shot went off and hit the wall in front of them.
Hoffmann held the intruder in a firm grip. It was a child. He turned on the hall light.
He saw who it was. But didn’t understand. “What the hell . . . it’s you!”
The adrenaline. Still pumping through him, his movements too powerful, too intense. If he hadn’t . . . my boys would have woken up in a few hours to find out I was dead? And with me dead—would the child standing in front of him continue on to them and . . . that image, he hated it, screamed, shook the boy.
“Is this how you honor your agreements!” Slapping him hard on both cheeks, leaving the red marks of a palm. “So El Mestizo gave you the job to kill me!” He shook the child again, more slaps. “Answer me, goddammit!”
“Y . . . yes.”
Hoffmann wasn’t sure—but it might be that the child in front of him was scared. And if not afraid, at least stripped of his dignity. “Yes, what? Answer me—I can kill just as fucking easily as you!”
“Yes. I broke our contract because I got paid better for you than by you. Yes. El Mestizo gave me the assignment.”
“And now . . . now you failed.”
The thin body didn’t try to tear itself loose, didn’t fight back—the only power Camilo had lay on the floor, already fired. Hoffmann forced him down on his stomach for a more thorough search. In one pocket he had a stiletto, and in a sheath on his back a short sword of the sort that children ordered from Japan and called tantō. Hoffmann threw both of them to the other side of the room.
“And those who fail El Mestizo expose him to danger.” Hoffmann stretched his right leg toward the gun and grabbed it with his foot, used his free hand to empty the magazine, seven cartridges left—it had originally been eight.
My whole family.
He pulled up the boy, no more than fifty kilos, threw the undeveloped body to the floor again. The boy slid a bit farther away, turned around, looked at him. And his fury vanished.
A child—who took the lives of other people. But nevertheless a child.
“And anyone who exposes El Mestizo to danger is putting themselves in a lot of fucking danger as well.”
A child, who had curled up as if to protect himself, who couldn’t know that his fury was gone.
“You . . . you’re . . . gonna kill me?”
�
�Not me. I’m no danger to you now. Camilo—you’ve failed, and El Mestizo is going to kill you.”
Hoffmann walked over to the boy, who raised his arms to protect himself, just skin and bone as armor. But the hit never came. Hoffmann grabbed him, lifted him, put him on the floor. He took a small stack of dollar bills out of his pocket.
“Now, go straight to the bus station. But don’t go back to Medellín. Doesn’t matter where you go—but not there, you hear that. You take the first bus you find and don’t get off until the last station. And when you get there, stay there, and thank the Blessed Mother you’re still alive.”
Donzel had been sitting on the park bench waiting. For a long, long time. But he had a mission. His very first.
He kept watch with a good view of the house, just as El Mestizo had instructed him. And just as El Mestizo said, a man eventually arrived—tall, agile, with some kind of cloth covering his head and neck—Donzel was sure of it despite the darkness. It was the right man.
And just like El Mestizo also said, he soon heard a shot. Dull, fired with a silencer, but still clear.
And then, finally, just as El Mestizo had said, Camilo came out of the house. And headed toward the bus stop, just as he was supposed to.
Donzel stepped down from the bench and stretched his back, which had become a bit stiff from sitting hunched over for so long. Unrolled the gun from the cloth. Started to follow.
Soon. A real sicario.
PIET HOFFMANN SHOOK, inside. Not out of fear, not even from rage. He sank into the driver’s seat, noted that the clock said 4:20, and tried to control the trembling that was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. It was as if everything had flowed together inside him and was now trying to squeeze its way out through his skin—three terrible years on the run, the threat of death ever-present, Zofia and Rasmus and Hugo, who he alternately exposed to risk and protected and had now left unattended in an apartment, and the child who had been sent to his house to take his life, and whose life he’d been so close to ending.
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