Three Seconds (52 page)

    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 Aspsås 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
was
in fact possible to hit him at this distance.

    "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.

"With the correct information,
I would have loaded and used the undercalibrated ammunition that is leaving Kungsingen in a helicopter this very moment and that won't get here in time. With this… if I'm going to penetrate reinforced glass to hit the target… it'll work. But I repeat… it isn't possible just to injure him. Once it's fired, the shot will be lethal."

     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 harsh ceiling light; it could be sweat, it could be tears. He hadn't even noticed her coming into his office, that she was now standing only a few meters from him.

    "Mariana Hermansson, City Police."

    He jumped.

    "I'd like to ask a few questions, about Hoffmann."

    He looked at her.

    "He is a dead man."

    She chose to stay where she was.

    "He said that."

    His eyes were evasive-she tried to catch them, but couldn't, they were always somewhere else.

    "He is a dead man. He said that!"

    She didn't know what she had expected. But it wasn't this. Someone who was on the verge.

    "His name is Martin. Did you know that? One of my best friends. No, more than that, my
closest
friend. The oldest employee at Aspsås. Forty years. He's been here forty years! And now… now he's going to die." She pursued the darting eyes.

    "Yesterday, Ewert Grens, a detective superintendent who is in fact leading the operation right now from the church tower, was here. He came to question one of the prisoners. Piet Hoffmann."

The square monitor.

    "If Martin dies…"

The mouth that moved so slowly.

    "If he dies…"

He is a dead man.

"I
don't know if-"

    "You said that it wasn't possible. That Hoffmann was ill. That he was in isolation in the hospital unit."

    "-I don't know that I could bear that."

    Lennart Oscarsson hadn't heard her.

    "I have just been to Block C. I spoke to Nycander. Hoffmann was never there."

The mouth.

    "You lied."

Moving.

    "You lied. Why?"

When it moves slowly on that monitor, it looks like it's talking about death.

    "Oscarsson! Listen to me! A person is lying dead on the floor in one of the corridors in Block B. Two other people have exactly nine minutes left to live. We need to make a decision. We need your answer!"

    "Would you like a cup of coffee?"

    "Why did you lie? What is this all about?"

    "Or tea?"

    "Who is Hoffmann?"

    "I've got green and red and normal tea in bags. The sort that you dunk."

    Large drops of sweat fell from the governor's face onto the shiny desktop when he got up and walked over to a glass and gold-frame cart stacked with porcelain cups and saucers in the corner of the room.

    "We need an answer. Why? Why did you lie?"

    "It's important not to leave it in too long."

    He didn't look at her, didn't turn round despite the fact that she had raised her voice for the first time. He held one of the cups under the thermos and filled it with steaming water, then carefully dropped a bag with a picture of a red rosehip attached into the middle.

    "About two minutes. No more."

    She was losing him.

    "Would you like milk?"

    They needed him.

    "Sugar? Both perhaps?"

    Hermansson put her hand under her jacket, angled her gun so that it slipped out of its holster, stretched out her arm in front of the chief warden's face, recoil operation: the shot hit the middle of the rectangular cupboard door.

    The bullet went straight through, hitting the back wall, and they heard it falling to the floor among the black and brown shoes.

    Lennart Oscarsson didn't move. The warm cup of tea still in one hand. She pointed to the wall clock behind the desk with the muzzle of her gun.

    "Eight more minutes. Do you hear? I want to know why you lied. And I want to know who Hoffmann is, why he's standing in the workshop window with a revolver to the hostage's head."

    He looked at the gun, at the cupboard, at Hermansson.

    "I was just lying on a… an unused bunk in Block K, searching the nice, newly painted white ceiling. Because… because I don't know who Hoffmann is. Because I don't know why he's standing there, daiming that he's going to shoot my best friend."

    His voice-she wasn't quite sure whether he was going to cry, or whether it was just the fragility of having given up.

    "What I do know is… is that it's about something else… that there's other people involved."

    He swallowed, swallowed again.

    "I was ordered to allow a lawyer to visit a client the evening before Grens was here. A prisoner in the same unit as Hoffmann. Stefan Lygas. He was one of the people who attacked him. And he was the one who… who was shot this morning. Lawyers, you might know, are often used as messengers when someone wants information to be spread inside… that's often the way it's done."