Three Seconds (47 page)

    His mobile phone was under the map.

    He let it stay there for the first three rings, then looked at it for the next three, then picked it up when he realized that it wasn't going to stop.

    The duty officer.

    "Ewert?"

    "Yes."

    "Where are you?"

    The familiar tone. Grens had already started to look for ways out of the frozen queue-a duty officer who sounded like that wanted help quickly. "The Klarastrand road, northbound."

    "You've got an order."

    "For when?"

    "It's damned urgent, Ewert."

    Ewert didn't like changing plans that had been decided.

    He liked routine and he liked closure and therefore found it difficult to change directions when in his heart he was already on his way.

    And so he should have sighed, perhaps protested a bit, but what he felt was relief.

    He didn't need to go. Not yet.

    "Wait."

    Grens indicated, nudged the nose of the car out into the opposite lane to make a U-turn over the continuous white line, accompanied by hysterical hooting from vehicles that had to brake suddenly. Until he'd had enough, rolled down the window and put the blue flashing light on the roof.

    All cars went silent. All the drivers ducked their heads.

    "Ewert?"

    "I'm here."

    "An incident at Aspsås prison. You know the prison better than any other officer in the county. I need you there, now, as gold command."

    "Okay.”

    "We've got a critical situation."

     John Edvardson was standing in the middle of the beautiful churchyard at Aspsås. Twenty minutes earlier he had come down from the church tower, leaving the marksmen who had seen Hoffmann and the hostages on two occasions now. They could force their way in whenever they wanted-a few seconds was all they needed to break down the door or come through a skylight and overpower the hostage taker, but as long as the hostages were alive, as long as they were unharmed, they wouldn't risk it.

    He looked around.

    The churchyard was being guarded by a patrol from Uppsala Police, who had cordoned off the area. No visitors were allowed inside the blue-andwhite plastic tape, no priests, no church wardens. Two patrol cars had come from Arlanda and another two from Stockholm and he had positioned one at each corner of the concrete wall that surrounded the prison. He now had four police officers from Aspsås district, and as many again each from Uppsala, Arlanda, and Stockholm, and when the twelve remaining members of the national task force arrived shortly, a total of thirty-seven police officers would be in place to watch, protect, attack.

    John Edvardson was tense. He stood in the churchyard looking at the gray wall and felt the unease that had been there from the start, gnawing at him, irritating him, yet he couldn't put a finger on it, there was something… something that wasn't right.

    Hoffmann.

    The man over there who had threatened to kill again, it didn't fit.

    In the past decade, Edvardson guessed there had been two, maybe three hostage takings a year in Swedish prisons. And each time the national task force was called in, with the same predictable scenario. An inmate had somehow managed to get hold of moonshine somewhere in the prison and had got steaming drunk, and then come to the conclusion that he had been wronged and treated unfairly, by the female prison staff in particular and, with the grandiosity that so often accompanies intoxication, had acted on impulse, become potent, dangerous, and had taken hostage some poor twenty-nine-year-old female warden who was only working there for the summer, rusty screwdriver to her throat. The alarm had been raised and two dozen specially trained police marksmen had been called out and then it was just a matter of time-the amount of time it took for the alcohol to leave his system and for it to gradually dawn on the hungover prisoner where the balance of power actually lay-before he gave himself up with hands above his head, and as a result was given a farther six years and more stringent terms for leave.

    But Hoffmann didn't fit that pattern.

    According to the wardens he had locked up in two separate cells, he was not under the influence, his actions were planned, each step seemed to have been analyzed, he was not acting on impulse, but with purpose.

    John Edvardson turned up the volume on his radio when he gave out instructions for the twelve members of the task force who had just arrived: four outside the door into the workshop in Block B to set up microphones, five to scale the walls of the building to get up onto the roof with more listening equipment, and three to reinforce those already out in the stairwell.

    He was closing in on the workshop and he had sealed off the churchyard.

    He had done everything that he could and should for the moment. The next step was up to the hostage taker.

    The heavy steel door into the third floor of the police headquarters was open. Ewert Grens ran his card through the card-reader, punched in a four-digit code and waited while the wrought-iron gate slid open. He went into the small space and over to the box with a number on it, opening it with his key and taking out the gun that he seldom used. The magazine was full and he pushed it into place: ammunition with a slightly pitted jacket, which was compensated for with something that looked like transparent glass, the kind of bullet that tore things to shreds. He then hurried back to Homicide, slowed down as he passed Sven Sundkvist's office,
we've got a job, Sven, and I want to see you and Hermansson in the garage in fifteen minutes and I want to know what we've got in our database for 721018-0010,
then rushed on. Sven may have answered something, but in that case he didn't hear.

    There was something up on the roof.

    Scraping noises, shuffling noises.

    Piet Hoffmann was standing by the pile of fiberglass tiles. He had made the right decision. If they had still been up there under the ceiling, they would have swallowed and muffled the small movements that were now happening above his head.

    More scraping sounds.

    This time outside the door.

    They were up the church tower, on the roof, by the door. They were reducing his field of action. There were enough of them now to guard the prison and still prepare for an assault on several fronts.

    He picked up the square fiberglass tiles and threw them, one after the other, at the door. They would hear it. They would be standing out there with their listening equipment and they would know that it was now more difficult to get in; that there was something in the way that would take another second to pass, the extra time a person holding a gun needs to shoot his hostages.

    Mariana Hermansson was driving far too fast, sirens wailing and blue lights flashing. They were now some distance north of Stockholm and were strangely silent, perhaps remembering previous hostage takings, or earlier visits to the prison as part of their day-to-day investigations. Sven rummaged around in the glove compartment and after a while managed to find what he was looking for, as he usually did: two cassettes of Siwan's sixties hits. He put one into the player, as they had always listened to Grens's past in order to avoid talking and gloss over the realisation that they didn't have much to say to each other.

    "Take that out!"

    Ewert had raised his voice and Sven wasn't sure that he understood why. "I thought-"

    "Take it out, Sven! Show some respect for my grief."

    "You mean-"

    "Respect. Grief."

    Sven ejected the cassette and put it back in the glove compartment, careful to close it in a way that Ewert would see and hear. He rarely understood his boss and he had learned not to ask questions, that sometimes it was easier just to let people's peculiarities be just that. He himself was one of the boring ones, someone who didn't seek out conflict, who didn't demand answers in order to position himself in the hierarchy. He had long since decided that those who were anxious and lacked confidence could do that,

    "The hostage taker?"

    "What about him?"

    "Have you got the background then?"

    "Hold on a sec."

    Sven Sundkvist pulled a document out of an envelope and then put on his glasses. The first page, from the criminal intelligence database, had the special code that was only used for a handful of criminals. He passed it to Grens.

KNOWN DANGEROUS ARMED

    "One of
those."

    Ewert Grens sighed. One of the ones who always meant reinforcement or special units with specially trained policemen whenever an arrest was planned. One of the ones who had no limits.

    "More?"

    "Criminal record. Ten years for possession of amphetamines. But it's the earlier conviction that's interesting for us."

    "Right."

    "Five years. Attempted murder. Aggravated assault of a police officer." Sven Sundkvist looked at the next document.

    "I've also got the grounds for judgment. When he was arrested in Söderhamn, the hostage taker first hit a policeman in the face several times with the butt of a gun, then fired two shots at him, one in the thigh and one in the left upper arm."

    Ewert Grens put his hand up.

    His face had turned a shade of red. He leaned back, and drew his other hand through his thinning hair.

    "Piet Hoffmann."

    Sven Sundkvist was taken aback.

    "How do you know that?"

    "That's what he's called."

    "I hadn't even read his name yet, but, yes, he is called that. Ewert. how did you know?"

    The red in Ewert's face deepened, his breathing was perhaps more labored.

    "I read the judgment,
Sven, precisely that goddamn judgment less
than twenty-four hours ago. It was Piet Hoffmann I was going to see when I went to Aspsås in connection with the murder at Västmannagatan 79."

    "I don't understand."

    Ewert Grens shook his head slowly.

    "He's one of the three names I was going to question and eliminate from the Västmannagatan investigation.
Piet Hoffmann.
I don't know why or how, but he was one of them, Sven."

    The churchyard should have been beautiful. The sun was shining through the high, green leaves, the gravel paths had recently been raked and the grass was in neat squares in front of the gravestones that stood silently waiting for the next visitors. But the beauty was an illusion, a facade that when they got closer was replaced with danger, anxiety, and tension, and the visitors had replaced their watering cans and flowers with semiautomatics and black visors. John Edvardson met them at the gate and they hurried toward the white church with the high steps up to a closed wooden door. Edvardson handed the binoculars to Ewert Grens, waiting in silence while the detective superintendent looked and found the right window.

    "That part of the workshop."

    Ewert Grens handed the binoculars to Hermansson.

    "There's only one entrance and exit to that part of the workshop. If you want to take hostages… that's completely the wrong place to go."

    "We've heard them talking."

    "Both of them?"

    "Yes. They're alive. So we can't go in."

    The room that was to the right just inside the church door wasn't particularly big, but it was big enough to be made into a control post. A room where the immediate family would gather before a funeral, or the bride and groom would wait before a wedding. Sven and Hermansson moved the chairs back to the wall while Edvardson went over to the small wooden altar and unfolded a plan of the whole prison and then a detailed plan of the workshop.

    "And visible… all the time?"

    "I could order the marksmen to shoot at any time. But it's too far. Fifteen hundred and three meters. I can only guarantee that our weapons will hit at max six hundred meters."

    Ewert Grens pointed a finger at the drawing and the window that, for the moment, was their only contact with a person who had committed murder a few hours ago.

    "He knows that we can't shoot him from here, and behind bars, behind reinforced glass… he feels safe."

    "He
thinks
that he's safe."

    Grens looked at Edvardson.

    "Thinks?"

"We
can't shoot him. Not with
our
equipment. But it is possible."

      There was a drawing lying on the large conference table in one of the corner rooms in the Government Offices. It was bright and the light from the ceiling blended with light from the high window with a view over the water at Norrström and Riddarfjärden. Fredrik Göransson smoothed the folds in the stiff paper with his hand and moved it so that it would be easier for the national police commissioner and the state secretary to see.