Anders Roslund - Three Seconds

Zofia had not stopped talking when he put the phone down. She had continued to talk to him in his head as he walked along the water at Norr Malarstrand and past the ugly buildings at Tegelbacken, and was there beside him with her frustration on the seat in the empty car. She wasn't to know that he was the sort who lied.

He shivered.

It was always cold in these sterile garages, but this particular chill came from within, a chill that neither clothes nor movement could change. There is nothing that chills like self-contempt.

The door to the driver's seat opened.

He checked his watch. Ten minutes exactly.

Erik usually waited somewhere on the floor above, where you could see every car in Section B if you bent down, and anyone who might be too close. He didn't turn around when he got in, said nothing, just started the minivan and drove the short distance from Hamngatan to Mynttorget, and in through the gate to the small stone yard and the building where the MPs had their offices. They got out and were no sooner through the door than a security guard came to meet them and asked them to follow him down two flights of stairs and along a corridor under the Riksdag building that came out in Rosenbad; it only took a few minutes to walk along the corridor between the two centers of political power in Sweden, and it was the only way to get into the Government Offices without being seen.

He checked the door, only a few meters from the main security office by the official entrance to Rosenbad. He held the door handle until he was certain that it was locked.

It was hard to move.

The sink merged into the toilet seat and the whitewashed walls pressed against him.

The thin oblong digital recorder was in his trouser pocket, with the cigar case and plastic tube from the drug store. He pushed in a button on the front, it flashed green. The battery was fully charged. He held it in front of his mouth and whispered: Government Offices, Tuesday the tenth of May and was careful not to turn it off as he slipped it into the cigar case which he would cover in lubricant until it glistened.

Paper towels around the base of the toilet. The microphone lead slipped through the small hole in the top of the cigar case.

He had done this many times before; fifty grams of amphetamine or a digital recorder, a prison or the Government Offices, the only way to safely transport something that you didn't want to be found.

He undid his trousers and sat down, the cigar case between his thumb and forefinger. He leaned forward and pushed it slowly up his anus, short thrusts until he felt it slip in a few centimeters, only then to slide out again and land on the paper towels.

Another attempt.

He pushed again, short thrusts, centimeter by centimeter, until it disappeared.

The microphone lead was long enough for him to pull it from his anus, along his crotch to his groin, where he fixed it to his skin with a small piece of tape.

The security guard behind the glass window was wearing a gray-and-red uniform, an older man with almost white hair and a shy smile. Piet Hoffmann stared at him for a bit too long, then looked away when he realized it.

He reminded him of his father. He would have looked just like that.

"Your colleague has already gone in."

"Toilet, had to go."

"Sometimes you just have to. State secretary for the Ministry of Justice, is that right?"

Piet Hoffmann nodded and wrote his name in the visitors' book just under Erik Wilson, while the white-haired man checked his ID. "Hoffmann, is that German?"

"From Konigsberg. Kaliningrad. But a long time ago. My parents." "What do you speak then? Russian?"

"When you're born in Sweden, you speak Swedish."

He smiled at the man who for a moment could have been his father. "And a fair bit of Polish."

He had spotted the camera as soon as they had arrived, right at the top of the glass box; he looked straight at it as he passed, stopped for a couple of seconds, his visit registered yet again.

It took seven minutes to walk behind a third security guard from the entrance and along a corridor on the second floor. It came over him so suddenly. He wasn't prepared. The fear. He was standing in the elevator when it hit him, felled him, made him shake. He had never felt fear like it before, fear that spilled over into panic, and then angst, and when he still couldn't breathe, death.

He was frightened of a man lying on the floor with three gaping wounds in his head and a breakthrough in a conference room in Warsaw and nights in a small cell and a death sentence that would become even more critical inside those walls, and Zofia's cold voice and the children's feverish skin and of no longer being able to tell the difference between the truth and lies.

He sat down on the floor of the elevator, exhausted, and avoided the guard's eyes until his legs stopped shaking so much and he dared to walk gingerly to the door that was standing half open at the end of a rather nice corridor.

One more time.

Piet Hoffmann stopped a couple of meters from the door, emptied himself as he always did of all thoughts, all feelings, pushed them aside and kicked them down and then he had put on his armor-that thick, horrible layer, his bloody shield, he was good at it, at not letting himself feel anything-one more time, one more bloody time.

He knocked on the door frame and waited until the feet that he heard scraping the floor stood in front of him. A policeman in civvies. He recognized him. They had met on two occasions. Erik's boss; the one called Göransson.

"Do you have anything that should be left out here?"

Piet Hoffmann emptied his inner pocket and trouser pockets of two mobile phones, a stiletto, folding scissors and put it all in an empty glass fruit bowl on the table opposite the door.

"Hold out your arms and spread your legs."

Hoffmann nodded and turned his back to the man who was tall and thin with an ingratiating smile.

"Apologies. You know that we have to do this."

The long, slim fingers felt over his clothes, against his neck, back, chest. When they pressed against his backside and balls, they touched the thin microphone lead twice without feeling anything. It slipped down a bit and Piet Hoffmann held his breath until it got stuck, about halfway down his thigh. It felt like it was going to stay there.

Big windows with deep white sills and a view over the still waters of Norrström and Riddarfjärden. The room smelled of fresh coffee and detergent and there were six chairs around the meeting table. He was last, only two places left, he moved toward one of them. They studied him without a word. He passed behind their backs and made sure to feel the fabric of his trousers with a casual hand: the microphone was still there, but facing in the wrong direction. He adjusted it as he pulled out a chair and sat down.

He recognized all four people, but had met only two of them before, Göransson and Erik.

The state secretary was sitting closest to him and she pointed to a document in front of her, then got up and held out her hand.

"The document-. I've read it. I assumed… I assumed that it concerned a… woman?"

She had a firm handshake. She was like the others, the ones who press too hard and think that it's the same as power.

"Paula."

Piet Hoffmann kept hold of her hand.

"That's my name, in here."

The uncomfortable silence dragged out and while he waited for someone to start speaking, he looked down at the papers that the state secretary had referred to.

He recognized Erik's way of expressing himself.

Västmannagatan 79. The secret report.

A copy of the same document lay in front of each of them. They were already part of the chain of events.

"This is the first time that Paula and I have met like this."