Three Seconds

'Bloody strong. Two parts grape sugar?'

'Yep.'

'How much?'

'Three kilos.'

'Enough for a fast-track trial and a long sentence in a high security prison.'

Piet Hoffmann pressed down the lid and put the tin back in his inner pocket. The other eighty-one kilos were still in the fan heater in the loft of the turn-of-the-century building on Vasagatan. He would later describe to Wilson where and how to find it. But not yet. It still had to be cut one more time, his own share, which he sometimes did, sold it on.

'I'm going to need three days to knock out all other business. Wojtek will get the reports they need to continue. Then we'll do what we set out to do. Eliminate.'

Erik Wilson should have felt calmer, happier, curious. His best infiltrator was on his way to prison, exactly where both the Swedish police and Wojtek had planned for him to be, and he would start and end a mafia branch expansion. He wasn't used to the stress and he saw that Piet had clocked it.

'I'm trying to solve Vastmannagatan in the usual way. A report to the head of homicide and the secret locker. But… it's not enough this time. Murder, Piet! We'll have to take it higher than police headquarters. We have to go to Rosenbad. And you're going to come too.'

'You know that's not possible.'

'You don't have any choice.'

'Erik, for fuck's sake, I can't just stroll in through the main entrance of the Government Offices, together with the police and politicians!'

'I'll collect you from 2B.'

Piet Hoffmann sat on the sofa that was protected with plastic sheeting that was sticking to his back and slowly shook his head.

'If anyone sees me… I'm dead.'

'In the same way that you'll be dead the minute anyone in prison discovers who you are. Only, you'll be banged up then. You need the authorities. To get out. To survive.'

He left the instant coffee in the second floor flat and instead drank a dark roast coffee with warm milk in a cafe on the corner of Palsundsgatan, and tried to concentrate on the sound of Italian crooners and a table of giggling girls who had swapped their school lunches for a plate of cinnamon buns, and two people at a table at the back who were trying to look like poets and talking too loudly about writing, but only succeeded in being an imitation of others who talked too loud.

Erik was right. Always on your own. He had no choice. Trust no one but yourself

He put down his empty coffee cup and walked over Vasterbron accompanied by a cautious sun, paused quietly for a while by the railings, twenty-seven meters above the water, and wondered how it would feel to jump, the seconds that were all and nothing before your body slammed into the transparent surface. He phoned home and spoke to Zofia from the middle of Norr Malarstrand and, yet another lie, told her that her work was just as important as his but that he couldn't come home and hold the fort until later on tonight. He heard her raise her voice and then put the phone down when he couldn't bear to lie anymore.

The asphalt became harder the closer to the heart of the city he came.

When he walked into a multi-story garage opposite an expensive department store, the pavement on Regeringsgatan was empty despite the fact it was only early afternoon. He climbed the narrow stairs up to the first floor, moved between the parked cars in section B until he spotted the black minivan with darkened windows in the far corner by the concrete wall. He went over and tried the handle on one of the back doors. It was unlocked. He opened the door to the back seat of the abandoned car, then looked at his watch. He would have to wait ten more minutes.

Zofia had not stopped talking when he put the phone down. She had continued to talk to him in his head as he walked along the water at Norr Malarstrand and past the ugly buildings at Tegelbacken, and was there beside him with her frustration on the seat in the empty car. She wasn't to know that he was the sort who lied.

He shivered.

It was always cold in these sterile garages, but this particular chill came from within, a chill that neither clothes nor movement could change. There is nothing that chills like self-contempt.

The door to the driver's seat opened.

He checked his watch. Ten minutes exactly.

Erik usually waited somewhere on the floor above, where you could see every car in Section B if you bent down, and anyone who might be too close. He didn't turn around when he got in, said nothing, just started the minivan and drove the short distance from Hamngatan to Mynttorget, and in through the gate to the small stone yard and the building where the MPs had their offices. They got out and were no sooner through the door than a security guard came to meet them and asked them to follow him down two flights of stairs and along a corridor under the Riksdag building that came out in Rosenbad; it only took a few minutes to walk along the corridor between the two centers of political power in Sweden, and it was the only way to get into the Government Offices without being seen.

He checked the door, only a few meters from the main security office by the official entrance to Rosenbad. He held the door handle until he was certain that it was locked.

It was hard to move.

The sink merged into the toilet seat and the whitewashed walls pressed against him.

The thin oblong digital recorder was in his trouser pocket, with the cigar case and plastic tube from the drug store. He pushed in a button on the front, it flashed green. The battery was fully charged. He held it in front of his mouth and whispered: Government Offices, Tuesday the tenth of May and was careful not to turn it off as he slipped it into the cigar case which he would cover in lubricant until it glistened.

Paper towels around the base of the toilet. The microphone lead slipped through the small hole in the top of the cigar case.

He had done this many times before; fifty grams of amphetamine or a digital recorder, a prison or the Government Offices, the only way to safely transport something that you didn't want to be found.

He undid his trousers and sat down, the cigar case between his thumb and forefinger. He leaned forward and pushed it slowly up his anus, short thrusts until he felt it slip in a few centimeters, only then to slide out again and land on the paper towels.

Another attempt.

He pushed again, short thrusts, centimeter by centimeter, until it disappeared.

The microphone lead was long enough for him to pull it from his anus, along his crotch to his groin, where he fixed it to his skin with a small piece of tape.

The security guard behind the glass window was wearing a gray-and-red uniform, an older man with almost white hair and a shy smile. Piet Hoffmann stared at him for a bit too long, then looked away when he realized it.

He reminded him of his father. He would have looked just like that.

'Your colleague has already gone in.'

'Toilet, had to go.'

'Sometimes you just have to. State secretary for the Ministry of Justice, is that right?'

Piet Hoffmann nodded and wrote his name in the visitors' book just under Erik Wilson, while the white-haired man checked his ID. 'Hoffmann, is that German?'

'From Konigsberg. Kaliningrad. But a long time ago. My parents.' 'What do you speak then? Russian?'

'When you're born in Sweden, you speak Swedish.'

He smiled at the man who for a moment could have been his father. 'And a fair bit of Polish.'

He had spotted the camera as soon as they had arrived, right at the top of the glass box; he looked straight at it as he passed, stopped for a couple of seconds, his visit registered yet again.

It took seven minutes to walk behind a third security guard from the entrance and along a corridor on the second floor. It came over him so suddenly. He wasn't prepared. The fear. He was standing in the elevator when it