This was just as bloody cowardly, just as premeditated, the oldest member of the staff, the weakest in the group.
'I want to take him out of action.'
'What do you mean.'
'Injure him.'
'I can't.'
'Can't? I just explained-'
'I can't, as I would have to shoot at his torso. And from here… the target's too small. If I was to shoot at one of his arms, say, first of all there is a risk that I would miss, and second, if I did hit one arm, other parts of his body would also be shot to bits.'
Sterner handed the gun to Grens.
The black, almost skinny weapon was heavier than he had imagined, he guessed about fifteen kilos, the hard edges pressing against his palm. 'That sniper gun… the force of impact would destroy a human body.' 'And if you hit him?'
'He'll die.'
The earpiece had almost fallen out a couple of times so he kept his finger on it, like before, every word was crucial.
Something crackled, a disturbance. He changed ears-the reception wasn't any better. He concentrated, listened, he had
That was enough.
Piet Hoffmann crossed the room to the small office with a desk at the back. He pulled open the top drawer and picked up the razor that was lying in an otherwise empty compartment between the pens and paperclips, then a pair of scissors from the pencil case. He carried on to the storeroom, to the warden called Jacobson who was still sitting against the wall. Hoffmann checked the plastic packing tape round his wrists and ankles, then with one tug he pulled down the curtain from the window and, picking up the rug from the floor, he went back into the workshop and the other hostage.
The little plastic pockets of nitroglycerine were still attached to his skin. The pentyl fuse was tightly wound around his body. Hoffmann met his pleading eyes as he threw the rug over him and secured it with the curtain.
He pushed the barrel of diesel by the workbench over and positioned it by the hostage's legs.
He groped under the rug, found the detonator and taped it to one end of the pentyl fuse.
Then he went back to the window, looked up at the church tower, and at the gun that was pointing at him.
They were standing by one of the tall windows on the second floor of the Government Offices. They had just opened the thin glass window wide and were drinking in the fresh, cool air. They were ready. Forty-five minutes earlier they had informed the gold commander on site at Aspsas church that he would shortly have the military marksman he had requested. He was already on his way.
What was irresolvable was now resolvable.
Everything was in place for a decision to be made based on the available documentation.
A decision that was Ewert Grens's alone, that he would shortly make on his own and for which he would be solely responsible.
He had never been in a church tower before. Not as far as he could remember. Maybe as a child, on some school trip traipsing behind an ambitious class teacher. Strange, really-all these years of training and he had never fired from such an obvious place: a church that was the highest point here as in many other places. He leaned back against the wall and looked at the heavy cast iron bell. He was sitting in there alone, resting as he should do, as a marksman always does before firing, a moment of peace in his own world while the observer stayed with the gun.
He had arrived at the church an hour earlier. In five hours' time he would be back in Kungsangen, he would have left his temporary post with the police and have been re-employed by the army. On his way here he had assumed it was a matter of shooting at an inanimate target. But that was not the case. In a few minutes he was going to do something he had never done before. Aim and fire a loaded gun at a person.
A real person.
The kind that breathes and thinks and will be missed by someone. 'Object in view.'
He wasn't afraid of firing the shot, of his ability to hit the target.
But he was afraid of the consequences, the internal ones, which you can never prepare for, like what death does to the person who kills.
'I repeat. Object in view.'
The observer's voice was urgent. Sterner went out into the light wind, lay down, held the weapon steady in his hands, waited. The shadow in the window. He looked at the observer-he felt the same thing, had made the same observation: neither of them were convinced that the man standing down there in profile didn't realize that it
'Preparing to fire.'
The heavy detective superintendent with the aggressive manner and a stiff leg that looked like it hurt more than he wanted to show was standing directly behind him.
'If Hoffmann doesn't withdraw his threat, I'm going to order you to shoot. His time runs out in thirteen minutes. Are you ready?'
'Yes.'
'And the ammo?'
Sterner didn't turn around, he stayed lying on his stomach the whole time, facing the prison, his eye focused on the telescopic sight and a window on the top of Block B.
The door was shut.
Brown, maybe oak, several scratches around the lock, a set of keys that scraped the door a little each time a key was turned twice in the stiff barrel. Mariana Hermansson knocked lightly on the door.
No footsteps, no voice-if anyone was in there they didn't move, or say anything, it was someone who didn't want to make contact.
On Ewert's order she had gone to look for the prison doctor on the other side of the large prison, inside the same walls, but several hundred meters away from the workshop and Hoffmann and the risk of more death. In Block C, through one of the hospital unit's small windows, she had watched a prisoner coughing in bed while a man in a white coat explained to her that 0913 Hoffmann had never been in any of the beds, that the symptoms of an epidemic had never been identified and that isolation had therefore never been ordered.
Ewert Grens had come up against a lie. The chief warden had prevented him from questioning an inmate. And right now that prisoner was holding a gun to a principal officer's head.
She knocked again, harder.
She pressed the handle down.
The door was unlocked.
Lennart Oscarsson was sitting in a dark leather armchair, his elbows on the wide desk in front, his head in his hands. His breathing was labored, deep and irregular, and she could see his forehead and cheeks shining in the
