Anders Roslund: Three Seconds

He had spent considerable time on two things in particular.

A transcript of the dialogue between the sniper and the observer just before the shot was fired.

Where they talked about a rug that Hoffmann had put over the hostage and tied with something that later in the investigation proved to be a pentyl fuse.

A rug that encapsulates and directs the blast pressure downward, protecting anyone standing nearby.

An interview with a principal prison officer called Jacobson.

Where Jacobson described how Hoffmann covered the hostage's skin with small plastic bags filled with some sort of fluid, which later in the investigation proved to be nitroglycerine.

Nitroglycerine in such large amounts that every part of the body is shattered and can never be identified.

Ewert Grens had laughed out loud in the office.

He had stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the video recorder and the transcripts on the desk and had continued to laugh as he left the police headquarters and drove out to Aspsås and the wall that dominated the small town. He had gone to central security and requested to see all footage from the prison security cameras from twenty-six minutes past two in the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of May and thereafter. He had driven back, got himself some fresh coffee from the machine and sat down to watch every moment that had passed since a lethal shot was fired from a church tower.

Grens had already known what he was looking for.

He had selected the camera that was called number fourteen and was installed about a meter above the glass front of central security. He had then fast forwarded and stopped to study every person who went out. Wardens, visitors, prisoners, suppliers, one head at a time as they passed, their hairline close to the lens; some showed their ID, some signed the register, most were waved through by a guard who recognized them.

He got as far as a tape that was recorded four days after the shot was fired.

Ewert Grens had known instantly that he'd found it.

A man with cropped hair in a Prison and Probation Service uniform had looked up at the camera as he left at six minutes past eight in the evening, looked up for just too long, and then gone on.

Grens had felt the pressure in his stomach and chest that was normally anger, but this time was something else.

He had stopped the tape and rewound, studied the man who chatted with the guard for a while and then looked up at the camera in the same way that he had done three weeks earlier with another guard in another glass-fronted security office, the one in the Government Offices. Grens had followed the uniformed person through the metal detector and the gate and the wall via cameras number fifteen and sixteen and had observed that the person had problems with his balance: it had been an almighty blast, the sort that could burst your eardrums.

You're alive.

That was why he had been sitting at his desk for three hours looking at a hole growing on the bookshelf.

I didn't make a decision about death.

That was why he had to determine if what he had just seen was something he should be concerned about or whether it was of no significance if no one else knew.

Hoffmann is alive. You didn't make a decision about death either.

He laughed again while he took a document out of the desk drawer-summons to the court proceedings for the issue of arrest warrants that he was about to attend and that would lead all the way to a conviction and long sentences for three high-ranking officers who had abused their power.

He laughed even louder, danced across the floor of the silent office, after a while quietly humming something that anyone passing just then might have recognized as a melody that perhaps sounded like a song from the sixties, like "Somebody's Fool" and Siw Malmkvist.

It was as if the sky were slowly closing in.

Erik Wilson stood in the asphalt yard, his thin clothes itching as nervous flies searched among the pearls of sweat. Ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit, just above body temperature and it would be even hotter in a couple of hours, in the early afternoon-the heat seemed to settle around that time of day.

He wiped his forehead with an already moist handkerchief and wasn't sure whether his skin or the material benefited most. It had been hard to concentrate in the lecture hall, the air conditioning in the building had broken down in the morning and the discussion about the follow-up course advanced infiltration had petered out. Even the heads of police from the western United States who normally liked to listen to their own voices were listless.

He watched, as he usually did, through the fence and barbed wire that overlooked the large practice ground-six black figures trying to protect a seventh, shots fired from two low buildings and two of them threw themselves over the protected object and the car raced forward and then off. Erik Wilson smiled. He knew how it would end: this president would also survive and the baddies who fired from the buildings would be unsuccessful. The Secret Service won every time, the same exercise as three weeks ago, different police officers, but the same exercise.

He turned his face up to the cloudless sky, as if to torment himself; the sun would wake him up.

At first he had blamed the heat. But it wasn't that.

He just wasn't there.

He hadn't been present at all in the last few days-he had taken part in the discussions and exercises, but he wasn't in the room, his thoughts and energy drained from his body.

Four days had passed since Sven Sundkvist had asked him to drive seventy kilometers to the state line and Jacksonville for lunch in a restaurant that had room for laptops with security camera images on its white tablecloths. He had seen Paula's face in a prison window and then an explosion and black smoke when the shot fired by a sniper had ripped apart a human being.

They had worked together for nearly nine years.

Paula had been his responsibility. And his friend.

He was nearly at the hotel, fleeing the heat on his cheeks and forehead. The spacious lobby was cool, jostling with people who were delaying going out. He headed for the elevator and the eleventh floor, the same room as before.

He got undressed and had a cold shower and lay down on top of the bed in his robe.

They burned you.

They whispered and then looked the other way.

He got up, the restlessness had returned, the lack of focus. He flicked through the day's edition of USA Today, yesterday's New York Times, drowned himself in TV ads for detergent and local lawyers. He wasn't there, no matter how hard he tried. He wandered around the room, stopping after a while in front of the mobile telephones he had already checked in the morning, his link to all the informants: five handsets side by side on the desk since the evening he arrived. It was usually enough to check once a day, but the restlessness and the feeling of being absent… he checked again.

Lifted them up, studied them, one by one.

Until he held the fifth phone in his hand. He sat down on the edge of the bed, shaking.

One missed call.

On a mobile phone that he should have disposed of as the informant was dead.

You don't exist anymore.

But someone is using your phone.

He was sweating again, but it wasn't the heat; this came from inside, a feeling that burned and cut, like nothing he had known before.

Someone has control of your phone. Someone has found it and has dialed the only number that is stored there.

Who?

Someone investigating? Someone in pursuit?