Three Seconds

north in Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Oslo more often.

The fireplace with its dark tiles and white frame was beautiful, the sort that he knew Zofia wanted at home. He fished up a handful of small dry twigs from the bottom of the wood basket and lit them, then waited until the larger, thicker logs that he placed on top started to burn before taking his clothes off. The jacket, trousers, shirt, underpants, and socks were all eaten by the yellow flames. Next, a pile of Jerzy's and Mariusz's clothes. The flames were red and intense now, and he stood naked in front of the fire, enjoying the warmth until they died down sufficiently for him to close the bathroom door and shower away this awful day.

A person had had half his head blown off.

A person who probably had the same job as he had, but had a less solid background.

He turned on the shower and the hot water pummelled his skin, testing his pain threshold, but he knew if he persevered, his body would eventually go numb and be filled with a strange calm.

He'd been doing this for too long; he sometimes forgot who he was and it frightened him when his life as someone else encroached on his life as a husband and father, and day-to-day reality in a house in a neighborhood where people cur their grass and weeded their flowerbeds.

Hugo and Rasmus.

He had promised to pick them up just after four. He turned off the water and took a clean towel from the shelf by the mirror. It was nearly half past four. He hurried back into the office, checked that the fire had died down, opened the wardrobe and picked out a white shirt, a gray jacket, and worn jeans.

You have sixty seconds to leave and lock the fiat.

He jumped and realized that he would never get used to the electronic voice that spoke to him from the coded lock on the front door, as soon as he had punched in the correct six digits.

The alarm will be activated in fifty seconds.

He should contact Warsaw immediately, he should have done it already, but had waited on purpose, he wanted to know that the delivery was secure first.

The alarm will be activated in forty seconds.

He locked the front door of Hoffmann Security AB and closed the wrought-iron gate. A security firm. That was how the organization worked. That was how all branches of the Eastern European mafia worked. Piet Hoffmann remembered his visit to St. Petersburg a year ago, a city with eight hundred security firms, established by ex-KGB men and intelligence agents, different fronts for the same business.

He was halfway down the stairs when one of his two phones rang. The mobile phone that only one person knew about.

'Wait a minute.'

He had parked the car just down Vasagatan. He opened the door and got in, then carried on the conversation without the risk of being overheard.

'Yes?'

'You need my help.'

'I needed it yesterday.'

'I've booked a return flight and will be back in Stockholm tomorrow. Meet you at number five at eleven. And I think you should make a trip yourself, before then. For the sake of your credibility.'

The gaping holes in the dead man^'s head seemed even larger from a distance.

Ewert Grens had followed Nils Krantz into the kitchen, but turned around again after a while to look at the man who was lying by an overturned chair and had one entrance wound in his right temple and two exit wounds in his left. He had been investigating murders for as long as the man on the floor had been alive and had learned one truth-each death is unique, with its own story, its own sequence of events, its own consequences. Every time he was faced with something he had not seen before, and he knew even before he looked into the empty eyes that they were looking in a direction that he couldn't follow.

He wondered where this particular death had ended, what these eyes had seen and were looking toward.

'Do you want to know or not?'

Krantz had been squatting on the kitchen floor for a bit too long. 'Otherwise I've got plenty else to be getting on with.'

His hand was close to a crack in the marble floor. Ewert Grens nodded, I'm listening.

'That spot there, can you see it?'

Grens looked at something that was whitish with uneven edges.

'Bits of stomach lining. And it's definitely no more than twelve hours old. There are several similar spots in this area.'

The forensic scientist drew a circle with his hand in the air around himself.

'All with the same content. Food remains and bile. But also something far more interesting. Bits of rubber.'

When Grens looked closer, he could see the white spots with uneven edges in at least three places.

'The rubber is partly corroded, probably by stomach acids.'

Krantz looked up.

'And traces of rubber in vomit, we know what that means.'

Ewert Grens gave a loud sigh.

Rubber meant human containers. Human containers meant drugs. A dead man in connection with a delivery meant a drugs-related murder. And a drugs-related murder always meant investigation and lots of hours, lots of resources.

'A mule, a swallower who's delivered the goods right here in the kitchen.'

He turned toward the sitting room.

'And him? What do we know about him?'

'Nothing.'

'Nothing?'

'Not yet. You have to have something to do, Grens.'

Ewert Grens went back into the sitting room and over to the man who no longer existed, watched as two men took hold of the dead man's arms and legs, as they lifted him and put him into a black body bag, as they pulled up the zipper and put the body bag on a metal stretcher that they only just managed to push down the narrow hall.

He left Vasagatan and then got caught in a traffic jam by Suisun. It was nearly five o'clock and he should have been at the kindergarten an hour ago.

Piet Hoffmann sat in the car and desperately tried to fend off the stress and heat and irritation caused by the afternoon traffic, which he could do nothing about. Three lanes at a standstill as far down the tunnel as he could see. To combat this battle with the city, he often thought about the soft skin on Zofia's face when he stroked it, or Hugo's eyes when he managed to ride his bike on his own, or Rasmus's hair, splashed with carrot soup and orange juice, standing out in every direction. It didn't work. Who did you do time with? Images of the people he was thinking about merged every time into images of a deal in a flat in Vastmannagatan that had ended in another man's death. Skane. Mio, Josef Libanon, Virtanen. The Count. How many names do you want? Another infiltrator with the same mission as he had. Who else? But the other infiltrator who sat facing him just didn't act as well. Who else? He, if anyone, should know what a faked background looked like, how it was put together, and which questions were needed to make it collapse. They had both been working for the police in their respective ways and ended up in the same place. He didn't have any choice, otherwise they might both have died, and one was in fact enough, one who wasn't him.

He had seen people die before. It wasn't that. It was part of his daily life and his credibility required it; he had learned to shrug off dead people who weren't close to him. But he had been in charge of this operation. A murder, he risked life imprisonment.