Anders Roslund: Three Seconds

"I apologize. My friends from Warsaw are a bit edgy."

Someone answered.

Piet Hoffmann spoke to whoever it was briefly, then showed the buyer the telephone display.

A picture of a man with long dark hair in a ponytail and a face that no longer looked as young as it was.

"Here. Frank Stein."

Hoffmann held his anxious eyes until he looked away.

'And you… you still claim that you know each other?"

He closed the mobile phone and put it down on the table.

"My two friends here don't speak Swedish. So I'm saying this to you, and you alone."

A quick glance over at the two men who had moved even closer and were still discussing which side they should stand on to aim the muzzle of the gun at the buyer's head.

"You and I have a problem. You're not who you say you are. I'll give you two minutes to explain to me who you actually are."

"I don't understand what you're talking about."

"Really? Don't talk crap. It's too late for that. Just tell me who the hell you are. And do it now Because unlike my friends here, I think that bodies only cause problems and they're no bloody good at paying up."

They paused. Waiting for each other. Waiting for someone to speak louder than the monotonous smacking sound coming from the dry mouth of the man holding his Radom against the thin skin of the buyer's temple.

"You've worked hard to come up with a credible background and you know that it crumbled just now when you underestimated who you were dealing with. This organization is built around officers from the Polish intelligence service and I can check out what the fuck I like about you. I could ask where you went to school, and you might answer what you've been told, but it would only take one phone call for me to find out whether it's true. I could ask what your mother's name is, if your dog has been vaccinated, what color your new coffee machine is. One single phone call and I'll know if it's true. I just did, made one phone call. And Frank Stein didn't know you. You never did time together at Tidaholm, because you were never there. Your sentence was faked so you could come here and pretend to buy freshly produced amphetamine. So I repeat, who are you? Explain. And then maybe, just maybe, I can persuade these two not to shoot."

Mariusz was holding the handgrip of the gun hard. The smacking noises were more and more frequent, louder. He hadn't understood what Hoffmann and the buyer were saying, but he knew that something was about to go down. He screamed in Polish, "What the fuck are you talking about? Who the fuck is he?" then cocked his gun.

"Okay."

The buyer felt the wall of immediate aggression, tense and unpredictable.

"I'm the police."

Mariusz and Jerzy didn't understand the language.

But a word like police doesn't need to be translated.

They started shouting again, mainly Jerzy, he roared that Mariusz should damn well pull the trigger, while Piet Hoffmann raised both his arms and moved a step closer.

"Back off!"

"He's the police!"

"I'm going to shoot!"

"Not now!"

Piet Hoffmann lurched toward them, but he wouldn't make it in time, and the man with the metal pressed against his head knew. He was shaking, his face contorted.

"I'm a police officer, for fuck's sake, get him off me!"

Jerzy lowered his voice and was b/ii4 almost calm when he instructed Mariusz to stand closer and to z drugiej strony swap sides again-it was better to shoot him through the other temple after all.

He was still lying in bed. It was one of those mornings when your body doesn't want to wake up and the world feels a long way off. Erik Wilson breathed in the humidity.

The south Georgia morning air that slipped in through the open window was still cool, but it would soon get warmer, even warmer than yesterday. He tried to follow the fan blades that played on the ceiling above his head, but gave up when he got tears in his eyes. He'd only slept for an hour at a time. They had talked together four times through the night and Paula had sounded more and more tense each time, a voice with an unfamiliar edge, stressed and desperate, on the verge of fleeing.

He had heard familiar sounds from the great FLETC training grounds for a while now, so it must be past seven o'clock, early afternoon in Sweden-they would be done soon.

He propped himself up, a pillow behind his back. From his bed he could look out through the window at the day that had long since dawned. The hard asphalt yard where the Secret Service had protected and saved a president yesterday was empty, but the silence after a pretend gunshot still reverberated. A few hundred meters away, in the next practice ground, a number of bright-eyed Border Patrol officers in military-like uniforms were running toward a white and green helicopter that had landed near them. Erik Wilson counted eight men clambering on board, who then disappeared into the sky.

He got out of bed and had a cold shower, which nearly helped. The night became clearer, his dialogue with fear.

I want you to get out.

You know that I can't.

You risk ten to fourteen years.

If I don't complete this, Erik, if I back out now, if I don't give a damn good explanation… I risk more than that. My life.

In each conversation and in many different ways, Erik Wilson had tried to explain that the delivery and sale could not be completed without his backing. He got nowhere, not with a buyer and the seller and mules already in place in Stockholm.

It was too late to call it off.

He had time for a quick breakfast: blueberry pancakes, bacon, that light white bread. A cup of coffee and The New York Times. He always sat at the same table in a quiet corner of the dining room as he preferred to keep the morning to himself.

He'd never had anyone like Paula before, someone who was so sharp, alert, cool; he was working with five people at the moment and Paula was better than all the others put together, too good to be a criminal.

Another cup of black coffee, then he had to rush back to the room: he was late.

Outside the open window, the green-and-white helicopter whirred high above the ground and three Border Patrol uniforms were hanging from a cable below, about a meter apart, as they shimmied down into pretend dangerous territory near the Mexican border. Yet another practice, always a practice here. Erik Wilson had been at the military base on the east coast of the United States for a week now; two weeks left of this training session for European policemen on informers, infiltration, and witness protection programs.

He closed the window as the cleaners didn't like them being open-something about the new air conditioning in the officers' accommodation, that it would stop working if everyone aired their rooms whenever they pleased. He changed his shirt, looking at the tall and fairish middle-aged man in the mirror who should by now have been making his way toward a day indoors in a classroom with his fellow students and policemen from four American states.

He stood still. Three minutes past eight. They should be done now. Paula's mobile phone was the extreme right of the five on the desk and just like all the others only had one number stored.

Erik Wilson didn't even have time to ask.

"It's a total fucking mess."

Sven Sundkvist had never learned to like the long, dark, and, at times, damp corridors of the homicide unit. He had worked with Stockholm City Police all his adult life, and from his office at one end of the unit, not far from the pigeonholes and vending machines, had investigated every category of crime in the penal code. This morning, as he made his way through the dark and damp, he stopped suddenly as he passed the open door to his boss's office.