Anders Roslund - Three Seconds

And still you chose it.

I don't get it.

His neck was stiff. The slightly too-high sofa arm.

He had fallen asleep.

The face in the window of a prison workshop had disappeared, sleep had taken over; the kind that came after rage that was soft and had rocked him gently for nearly seven hours. He might have woken up once, he wasn't sure, but it felt like that, like the telephone had rung, like Sven had said that he was sitting in an airport outside New York waiting for the next flight to Jacksonville, that the sound file was interesting and that he had prepared himself on the plane, for a meeting with Wilson.

It was a long time since Ewert Grens had slept so well.

Despite the bright sunlight in the room, despite all the damnable noise.

He stretched. His back was as sore as it usually was after sleeping on the narrow sofa, his stiff leg ached when it reached the floor. He was slowly falling to bits, one day at a time. Fifty-nine-year-old men who exercised too little and ate too much generally did.

A cold shower in the changing room that he seldom used, two cinnamon buns and a bottle of banana-flavored drinking yogurt from the vending machine.

"Ewert?"

"Yes?"

"Is that your lunch?"

Hermansson had come out of her office farther down the corridor, she had heard him, the limping, it was just Grens lumbering around. "Breakfast, lunch, I don't know. Did you want something?"

She shook her head, they walked slowly, side by side.

"This morning, early… Ewert, was it your voice?"

"You live here in Kungsholmen?"

"Yes."

"Nearby?"

"I don't have far to go."

Grens nodded.

"Then it was probably me you heard."

"Where?"

"Up in the remand yards on the roof You get a good view from up there."

"I heard. And so did the rest of Stockholm."

Ewert Grens looked at her, smiled, something he didn't do often.

"It was a choice between that and firing a bullet through a wardrobe door. I understand that some prefer the latter."

They had come to his door. He stopped. It felt like she was going to come in.

"Did you want something, Hermansson?"

"Zofia Hoffmann."

"Yes?"

"I'm not getting anywhere. She's disappeared."

The banana-flavored yogurt was finished. He should have bought one more.

"I've checked with her work again. She hasn't been in touch since the hostage drama. The children's nursery, same story."

Mariana Hermansson tried to peer into his office. Grens closed the door a bit more. He didn't know why, she had come there several times a day since he employed her three years ago. But he had just been asleep there, nearly seven hours on the sofa-it was as if he didn't want her to know that.

"I've located her closest family. Not many of them. Her parents, an aunt, two uncles. All in the Stockholm area. She isn't there. The kids aren't there."

She looked at him.

"I've spoken to the three women who are described as her best friends. With neighbors, with a gardener who works for the family for a couple of hours every now and then, with several members of a choir where she sings a couple of times a week, with the oldest son's football coach and the youngest son's gymnastics teacher."

She shrugged.

"No one has seen them."

Hermansson waited for a response. She didn't get one.

"I've checked the hospitals, hotels, hostels. They aren't anywhere, Ewert. Zofia and the two boys, they can't be found anywhere."

Ewert Grens nodded.

"Wait here. I want to show you something."

He opened the door, closed it behind him, careful that she shouldn't see in or follow him.

You came to Aspsås prison as Wojtek's contact man in Sweden.

You were there to knock out the competition for them and then establish Wojtek and expand.

One single moment and you were someone else.

One single meeting with a lawyer, a messenger, and they knew who you really were.

You called her. You warned her.

Grens lifted up a padded envelope that was lying on his desk and was now emptied of three passports, a receiver, and a CD with a secret recording. He went back out to the corridor and Hermansson with it under his arm.

"She received two short phone calls from Hoffmann. We don't know what they were about and we haven't found anything to indicate that she was involved in any way. We have no reasonable grounds to suspect her of anything whatsoever."

Grens held up the envelope so that Hermansson could see it.

"We can't issue a warrant for her arrest abroad. Even though that is where she is."

He pointed at the postmark.

"I'm convinced that it was Zofia Hoffmann who sent this. Frankfurt am Main International Airport. Two hundred and sixty-five destinations, fourteen hundred flights, one hundred and fifty thousand passengers. Every day."

He started to head for the vending machine-he needed another yogurt, another cinnamon bun.

"She's well gone, Hermansson. And she knows. She knows that we have no grounds to get her or even look for her."

The sun was high.

It had been warm since early morning. He had fought with the damp sheets and a pillow drowned in sweat from his hairline, the temperature rising a couple of degrees every hour until now, just before lunch. The heat and the sharp light forced him to stop abruptly in front of the great gate until what was double had disappeared.

Erik Wilson sat quietly in the front seat of the rented car.

He had been here for five days, back in Glynco, Georgia, at a military base called FLETC, to continue the work that had been interrupted when Paula rang about a buyer in Västmannagatan who had paid with a Polish bullet to the head.

He started the car again, rolled slowly through the gate and past the guard who saluted. Three more weeks. Cooperation between the Swedish and European police and American police organizations was essential for the farther development of their CHIS work, and this was where they had the strongest tradition and knowledge, and as Paula was out of contact while he worked behind the walls of Aspsås, it was the perfect time to finish the course he had started in advanced infiltration.

The heat was incredible.

He still hadn't gotten used to it-normally it was easier, less invasive. At least that's what he remembered from previous visits.

Maybe it was the climate that had changed. Maybe it was he who had gotten older.

He liked driving along the wide, straight roads in this great country that was built around traffic. He accelerated when he reached the 1-95, sixty kilometers to Jacksonville and the other side of the state boundary, half an hour on a day like today.

He had been woken by the phone call.

It was still dawn, sharp sunlight and the birds with their piercing song had come alive outside his window.

Sven Sundkvist had been sitting in a bar eating breakfast at Newark Liberty International Airport.

He had explained that he would continue his journey in a few hours.

He said that he was on his way south because he needed immediate assistance with an investigation.

Erik Wilson had asked what it was about-they seldom talked to each other when they met in the corridors of the police headquarters in Kungsholmen, why should they do so here, seven thousand kilometers away? Sundkvist hadn't answered, and instead had repeatedly asked when and where until Wilson had suggested the only lunch restaurant that he knew, somewhere where you could sit without being seen, without being heard.

It was a pleasant place on the corner of San Marco Boulevard and Philips Street, quiet in spite of every table being taken and dark in spite of the sun blasting on the roofs, walls, and windows. Sven Sundkvist looked around. Men dressed in suits and ties who glanced at each other on the sly as they gave their best arguments accompanied by grilled fish; negotiations that involved European wine and mobile phones on the white tablecloth. Waiters who were invisible, but were by the table the moment a plate was empty or a napkin fell to the floor. The smell of food blended with candles and the scent of red and yellow roses.