Three Seconds

space. One of those buildings from a time when power was measured in size.

The nave was empty except for the warden who was moving some wooden chairs from just by the christening font, silent apart from a scraping sound up in a gallery near the organ.

He went in and put a twenty-kronor note in one of the collection boxes on the table by the entrance, then nodded at the warden who had heard some movement and turned around. He went back out into the vestibule, waited until he was certain that he wasn't being watched before opening the gray door to the right.

He slipped in as quickly as he could.

The staircase was steep, with treads from a time when people were shorter. The door at the top swung open with a little pressure from a crowbar in the gap around the doorframe. The simple aluminum ladder leaned against a narrow hatch in the roof, the entrance to the church tower.

He stopped.

A sound made its way up. Muffled notes from the organ.

He smiled, the scraping that he had heard earlier in the nave from the gallery had been a cantor preparing the day's psalms.

The aluminum ladder swayed unsteadily when he pulled a pipe wrench from his bag and grabbed the hook of the padlock on the hatch. One firm thrust and it sprang open. He opened the hatch, climbed into the tower and ducked down under the enormous cast iron bell.

One more door.

He opened it and went out onto the balcony with a view that was so stunning that he was forced to stand still and follow the sky down to the woods and the two lakes and what looked like a rugged mountain in the far distance. With his hands on the rail, he inspected the balcony, which was not large-there was enough space to lie down. It was windier up here. The same wind that amused itself with leaves and small branches at ground level moved more freely here and the balcony shook when it was caught by a gust that tried to pull it along. He looked at the wall and the barbed wire and the buildings with bars on the windows. Aspsas prison was just as big and just as ugly from here and the view was uninterrupted, nothing in the way: it was possible to see every inmate in the heavily guarded prison yard, every pointless metal fence, every locked door in the concrete.

And… that we will look after you when the work is done. I know that you will then have a death threat on you, branded throughout the criminal world. We will give you a new life, a new identity, and money to start over again abroad.

The recorder was in his hand and her voice just as clear, despite the monotonous moan of wind.

I guarantee you this in my capacity as a state secretary of the Ministry of Justice.

If he succeeded.

If he carried out his work behind those walls down there exactly as they had planned, he would have a death sentence on him, he would have to get out, away.

He put down his shoulder bag and from the front pocket took out a thin black cable and two transmitters, both silver and about the size of a small coin, attached one transmitter to each end of the cable, which was about half a meter long, and fixed it to the outside of the railing with Blu-Tack, facing the prison, where it would be invisible to anyone standing on the church tower balcony.

He squatted down and with a knife cut off a couple of centimeters of the black protective covering on the cable to expose the metal wires so he could splice it to another piece of cable which he then also attached to the outside of the railing. He lay down, his body close to the railing and wired that cable to what looked like a small piece of black glass.

Always alone.

He stuck his head out through the railings to check that the two cables, two transmitters, and solar cell were properly attached to the outside.

Trust only yourself.

The next time someone stood out here and spoke, he or she would do so without knowing that every word, every sentence could be heard by someone who had been sentenced to serve time down there, inside the walls of Aspsas prison.

He paused to look at the view again.

Two extremes, so close, so far apart.

If he stood on the church tower's windy balcony with his head cocked, he could see the glittering water and treetops and endless blue sky.

If he bent his head even farther, he met a separate world with a separate reality, nine square concrete buildings that from a distance looked like a collection of identical Lego pieces, where the most dangerous individuals in the country were crammed together and locked up with days that were totally predictable.

Piet Hoffmann knew that he would be given the job of cleaner in Block B, one of the conditions from the meeting at the Government Offices and one of the tasks that the general director of the Swedish Prison and Probation Service had been ordered to sort out. He concentrated therefore on the Lego piece that stood roughly in the middle of the world that was framed by a seven-meter-high wall and with binoculars studied, section by section, the building that he did not know yet but which in a couple of weeks' time would be his day-to-day reality. He picked out a window on the second floor, the workshop, the largest workplace for inmates at Aspsas who chose not to study. A window that was positioned near the roof, with reinforced glass and closely spaced metal bars, but with the binoculars he could still see several of the people in there working on the machines, faces and eyes that stopped every now and then to look out and yearn-so dangerous when all you could do was count the days and pass the time.

A closed system with no escape.

If I'm exposed. If I'm burned. If I'm alone. He would no longer have any choice.

He would die.

He lay down on the balcony, crawled over to the railing holding an imaginary gun with both hands and aimed at the window he had just decided on, on the second floor of Block B. He studied the trees by the churchyard wall-the wind had increased and the bigger branches were moving now.

Wind strength twelve meters per second. Adjust eight degrees to the right.

He aimed his imaginary gun at a head that was moving around inside the workshop window. He opened his bag and took out a rangefinder, aimed it at the same window.

He had already estimated the distance to be around fifteen hundred meters.

He checked the display, a hint of a smile.

It was exactly fifteen hundred and three meters from the balcony of the church tower to the reinforced window.

Distance fifteen hundred and three meters. Clear view. Three seconds from firing to impact.

His hands gripped the nonexistent gun hard.

It was five to ten when he walked back past the graves and protecting sycamore trees, down the neatly raked gravel path to the car that was parked outside the gate. He was on schedule-he had managed to sort out what he had to at the church and would be the first customer in Aspsas library when it opened.

A separate building on the square, tucked between the bank and the supermarket, a librarian in her fifties who was as friendly as she looked. 'Can I help you?'

'In a moment. I just want to check some titles.'

A children's corner with cushions and small chairs and Pippi Longstocking books stacked in equal piles, three plain tables for anyone who wanted to study or just read for a while in peace, a sofa with headphones for listening to music and computers for surfing the Internet. It was a nice little library, quiet with a prevailing atmosphere of meaningful time in contrast to the prison wall that dominated the view through each window, signalling trouble and detention.

He sat down at one of the screens by the lending desk and searched in the library catalogue. He needed the titles of six books and looked for ones that presumably had not been borrowed for a long time.

'Here.'

The friendly librarian looked at his handwritten list.

Byron Don Juan