Anders Roslund - Three Seconds

"You have to be in control, at all times. If everything goes wrong… the authorities won't look after you, they'll burn you."

He started to walk.

He had exactly thirty-eight hours left.

The black minivan stopped in a dark concrete corner of the multi-story garage.

Second floor, section A.

"Thirty-eight hours."

"See you."

"Outlawed. Don't you forget it."

Piet Hoffmann put his hand on Erik Wilson's shoulder and then got out of the back seat and breathed in the air that tasted of carbon dioxide. The narrow stairs led down to Regeringsgatan and the capital that was always in a rush.

Tulips. Church. SwissMiniGun. Ten kilos. Library. Wind meter. Letters. Transmitters. Nitroglycerine. Safety deposit box. CD. Poetry. Grave. Thirty-seven hours and fifty-five minutes left.

He started to walk along the pavement, passing close to people who looked at him without seeing him, strangers who lacked smiles. He longed for a particular house in a quiet street a few kilometers south of the city, the only place where he wasn't hounded and nothing demanded that he survive. He should call her again. Tulips and nitroglycerine and wind meter, he knew that he was capable and that he could do it in time, but Zofia, he still had no idea what to do about her. If danger and risk were involved, it was enough to be in control, then he could steer the outcome, but with Zofia he was never in control at all, he wasn't able to influence her reactions and feelings, no matter how he tried, he had no way of approaching her on his own terms.

He loved her so much.

Now he was doing the same as everyone else, hurrying along the city streets without a smile on his face: Master Samuelsgatan, Klara Norra Kyrkogata, Olof Palmes gata, and into a flower shop called Rose Garden on the corner of Vasagatan, which fronted onto Norra Bantorget. Two customers before him. He relaxed, lost himself in the red and yellow and blue flowers that all had names on small, square signs that he read and promptly forgot.

"Tulips?"

The young woman also had a name on a square badge that he had read several times and forgotten.

"Maybe I should vary it a bit?"

"Tulips always work well. In bud? From the cold room?"

"As usual."

One of the few flower shops in Stockholm that had tulips in May, perhaps because there was one customer of about thirty-five, who regularly came in and bought large bunches if they had been stored at max five degrees and still hadn't come out.

"Three bunches? One red, and two yellow?"

"Yes."

"Twenty-five stems in each bunch? And the plain white cards?" "Please."

Rustling tissue paper around each bunch. With thanks for a successful partnership, Aspsås Business Association on the card in each of the yellow bunches, and I love you on the one for the red bunch.

He paid and walked a couple of hundred meters down Vasagatan to a door with a plaque that said Hoffmann Security AB, first floor. He opened the door, turned off the alarm and walked straight across the kitchen to the sink where he had emptied fourteen mules of between fifteen hundred and two thousand grams of amphetamine each, the day before.

There was a vase in one of the kitchen cupboards. He found it in the one above the extractor fan and filled the heavy crystal glass with water and the bunch of twenty-five red tulips. The other two bunches, fifty light-green stems with as yet unopened, yellow buds, lay lined up across the worktop.

He turned the oven on to what he guessed was about 125 degrees. It was hard to distinguish exactly where one line changed to two on the old dial.

The fridge went down from 45 to 35 degrees, and just to be sure, he put a thermometer on the top shelf, as the gauge that was incorporated inside the plastic door was too crude and in any case, difficult to read.

Piet Hoffmann left the kitchen and the flat with an IKEA bag in his hand, went up the stairs two at a time to the loft and the shiny aluminum pipe, and knocked off the steel band in the way that he had when Henryk had been with him in the morning. Eleven tins, one at a time, from the fan heater into the bag. Then he locked up again and went down with eleven kilos of cut amphetamine in his arms.

I need three days to knock out the competition.

He checked the oven. It was warm, 125 degrees. He opened the fridge, checked the thermometer on the top shelf, 40 degrees, like in the flower shop, but he had to get the temperature down to 35.

I want to know how you're going to do it.

First tin out of the IKEA bag. One thousand grams of amphetamine. More than enough for fifty tulips.

With tulips and poetry.

He had cleaned the sink meticulously, but he still found some remains from yesterday that had gotten stuck to the edges of the metal plughole. The unplanned shooting and mules who, in a panic, had to be emptied in the one place they must never be linked to. He turned on the tap and let the hot water run while he picked off the last bits of vomit and milk and brown rubber.

The fireproof gloves were in one of the drawers with the cutlery. He laid a tulip on each one and put them into the oven, with the round buds nearest to the door. He loved the moment when it happened. Spring and life encapsulated on the end of a green stem. The buds suddenly woke up in the warmth of the oven and revealed their true color for the first time.

He took them out when they were just a couple of centimeters open, he had to be careful not to wait too long, to lose himself in the beauty, color and life.

He put them down on the worktop and took out the box of condoms-no ribs and no lubricant and definitely no scent-and carefully poked half a condom down into each bud, then filled it with amphetamine, one tip of a knife at a time. Three grams in the small buds, four in the slightly larger ones, pressed it down hard to get as much as possible in. Then he popped the two amphetamine-filled tulips on a serving dish in the humming freezer between the sink and the range.

They had to lie there in -65 degrees for ten minutes. Until the buds had closed again, gone back to sleep and hidden their glory. Only then would he move them from the freezer to a fridge regulated to 35 degrees and a long rest that would delay them flowering.

The next time they opened it would be at room temperature on a governor's desk.

When he wanted them to.

Piet Hoffmann stood in his large office looking out of the window at the people and cars on Kungsbron and Vasagatan, as was his wont. He had filled fifty tulips with a total of 185 grams of 30 percent amphetamine, without even thinking about the fact that the whitish-yellow powder had stolen years of his life and there had been a time when every waking hour was used to steal enough to get more for the next day. The rehab center, the fear, the prison sentence, the drug had been all-consuming and everything else meaningless until the morning she was suddenly standing in front of him. He had never injected since. She had forced him to hold onto her hand hard, as only people who trust each other can.

The cigar case was lying on the desk. The digital recorder beside it.

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

A recorder small enough to be transported in your anus.

Now it was voices on the computer.

That's my name, in here.

He copied the whole recording onto two separate CDs and put one in a brown and one in a white 8 x 10 envelope. He took down four passports from the top shelf in the gun cabinet, put three of them in the brown envelope and the fourth in the white envelope. Finally, he got out two small transmitters and two earpieces and put one in each envelope.