Three Seconds

'He wasn't my friend.'

You trusted me.

'But I was his friend.'

I trusted you.

'That's the way it works, Sundkvist. A handler pretends to be the informant's best friend. A handler has to play the role of the informant's best friend so goddamn well that the informant is willing to risk his life every day to get more information for his handler.'

I miss you.

'So the guy you saw on the screen? You were right. I didn't react.' Erik Wilson dropped his linen napkin on the table.

'Are you paying, Sundkvist?'

He started to leave. The tasteful restaurant around him, the lady on her own at the table to the left with a glass of red wine, two men to the right at a table full of papers and dessert plates.

'Vastmannagatan 79.'

Sven Sundkvist caught up with him, beside him.

'You knew everything, Erik. But you chose to say nothing. And contributed to the disappearance of someone associated with a murder. You manipulated police authority records and the national courts administration database. You placed-'

'Are you threatening me?'

Erik Wilson had stopped, red face, shoulders up.

He was showing something that was more than just nothing. 'Are you, Sundkvist? Threatening me?'

'What do you think?'

'What do I think? You've tried to convince me by showing me evidence and tried to get me to feel something by showing me pictures of death. And now you're trying to threaten me with some kind of goddamn investigation? Sundkvist, you've used all the chapters in the interview book. What do I think? You're insulting me.'

He continued on down the small step, past the table with four older men who were looking for their glasses and studying the menu and the empty serving carts and the two green climbers on a white wall.

One last look.

He stopped.

'But… the truth is that I don't like people who burn my best informant when I'm not there.'

He looked at Sven Sundkvist.

'So… yes, that recording. The meeting you're talking about. It did happen. What you heard is genuine. Every single word.'

Ewert Grens should perhaps have laughed. At least felt whatever it was that sometimes bubbles up in your belly, a delight that can't be heard.

The recording was genuine.

The meeting had taken place.

Sven had called from a restaurant in the center of Jacksonville as he watched Wilson walk to his car and start the journey back to south Georgia, after he had confirmed it all.

Grens didn't laugh. He had emptied himself that morning in a cage on a roof. He had screamed until the rage was released and let him sleep on a sofa. So now there was a space to be filled.

But not with more anger, that was no longer enough.

Not with satisfaction, even though he knew he was so close.

But hate.

Hoffmann had been burned. But survived. And taken hostages in order to continue surviving.

I carried out a legitimate murder.

Ewert Grens phoned a person he loathed for the second time. 'I need your help again.'

'Okay.”

'Can you come to my apartment tonight?'

'Your flat?'

'Corner of Odengatan and Sveavagen.'

'Why?'

'As I said. I need your help.'

Lars Agestam scoffed.

'You want me to meet you? After work? Why should I want to do that?

After all… I'm not… now how did you put it… your buddy.'

The secret intelligence report that was also on the laptop, but so fresh that it was in another file.

The one I didn't show you last night.

The one that I'm going to show you because I have no intention of carrying someone else's guilt.

'It's not social, it's work. Vastmannagatan 79. The preliminary investigation you just scaled down.'

'You're welcome to come to the Regional Public Prosecution Office tomorrow during the day.'

'You can open it again. As I know what actually happened. But I need your help one more time, Agestam. Tomorrow morning is too late. That is when the head of the Government Offices security realizes that something is missing and passes on that information. When the wrong people then have time to adapt their versions, manipulate the evidence, change reality yet again.'

Grens coughed extensively close to the mouthpiece, as if he was uncertain as to how to continue.

'And I apologize. For that. I was perhaps… well, you know.' 'No, what?'

'Damn it, Agestam!'

'What?'

'I was perhaps… I may have been a bit… churlish, a bit… well, unnecessarily harsh.'

Lars Agestam walked down the seven flights of stairs in the offices at Kungsbron. A pleasant evening, warm, he longed for heat, as he always did after eight months of bitter wind and unpredictable snow. He turned around, looked at the windows of the Regional Public Prosecution Office, all dark. Two late phone calls had been longer than he expected: one phone call home-he had explained that he had to stay late and several times promised that he would wash the glasses from last night which still smelled of alcohol before he went to bed-then one call with Sven Sundkvist. He had gotten hold of him somewhere that sounded like an airport. He had wanted more information about the part of the investigation that involved Poland and their trip there to a now defunct amphetamine factory.

'His flat?'

'Yes.'

'You're going to Ewert Grens's flat?'

Sven Sundkvist hadn't said anything but didn't want to hang up-their conversation was already finished and Agestam was impatient, wanted to get on his way.

'Yes. I'm going to Ewert Grens's flat.'

'I'm sorry, Agestam, but there's something I don't quite understand. I've known Ewert, I've been his closest colleague for nearly fourteen years. But I have never, never ever, Agestam, been invited to his flat. It's… I don't know… so private, a strange kind of… protection. Once, five years ago, one time only, Agestam, the day after the hostage drama in the morgue at Soder hospital, I forced my way into his home, against his will. But now you're saying that he asked you there? And you're quite sure about that?'

Lars Agestam wandered slowly through the city, lots of people on the street despite the fact it was a Sunday and past nine o'clock-after winter's drought of warmth and company it was always harder to go home when life had just returned.

He hadn't realized that it might be more than just an investigation, more than just a question of working late. It really felt like something had changed last night in the kitchen at Akeshov; the whisky and three hundred and two copies of secret intelligence reports resembled a kind of closeness. But Ewert Grens had soon killed that feeling, happy to hurt in the way that only he knew how. So if it was as extraordinary to be invited to his flat as Sven made