Three Seconds (66 page)

    During the night he had printed out three hundred two secret intelligence reports from the county police commissioner's laptop. So far he had managed to go through one hundred of them, comparing the truth with the city police investigations. Twenty-five had resulted in
nolle prosequi,
thirty-five in an acquittal.

    "Judgments were given in the remaining forty cases, but I can tell you that the judgments were wrong due the lack of underlying information. The people who were tried were given sentences, but for the wrong crime.
Grens, are you listening?
In all cases!"

    Ewert Grens looked at the prosecutor, suit and tie, a file in one hand, glasses in the other.

    A bloody rotten system.

    And there's more, Ågestam.

    Soon we'll talk about the intelligence report you haven't seen yet, the one that is so hot off the press that it's in a separate file.

    Västmannagatan 79.

    An investigation that we closed when other policemen with offices on the same corridor had the answer we lacked, which meant that a person had to be burned and they needed a useful idiot to carry the can.

    "Thank you. You've done a good job."

    He held out his hand to the prosecutor he would never learn to like.

    Lars Ågestam took it, shook for a bit too long perhaps, but it felt good, personal, on the same side for the first time, the long hours at night, each with a glass of whisky and Grens who had called him Lars on one occasion. He smiled.

    Conscious spite and attempted insult, he didn't need to worry this time. He let go of his hand and had just started to head for the door with a strange joy in his heart when he suddenly turned around.

    "Grens?"

    "Yes?"

    "That map you showed me when I was here last."

    "Yes?"

    "You asked about Haga. North Cemetery. If it was nice there."

    It was lying on the desk. He had seen it as soon as he came in. A map of a resting place that had been used for more than two hundred years and was one of the largest in the country.

    Grens kept it at hand. He was going to go there.

    "Did you find what you were looking for?"

    Ewert Grens was breathing heavily, rocking his great bulk.

    "Well, did you?"

    Grens turned round pointedly. He said nothing, just the labored breathing as he faced the pile of files on the desk.

    "Hm, Ågestam?"

    "Yes?"

    He didn't look at the visitor who was about to leave, his voice was different, it was a bit too high and the young prosecutor had long since learned that that often meant discomfort.

    "You seem to have misinterpreted something."

    "Right?"

    "You see, Ågestam, this is just work. I am not your damn buddy."

    They had gotten their food, fish that wasn't salmon, the waiter's suggestion.
I need to know whether the recording that was left in an envelope in Grens's pigeonhole is genuine.
They had eaten without speaking, without even looking at each other.
If what can be heard here is exactly what was said.
The questions were there on the table beside the candlestick and pepper grinder, waiting for them.
If three people who have never touched a trigger were accomplices to a legitimate murder.

    "Sundkvist?"

    Erik Wilson put his cutlery down on the empty plate, emptied his third glass of mineral water, lifted the napkin from his knee.

    "Yes."

    "You've come a long way for nothing."

    He had decided.

    "You
see,
in some way… it's like we're all in the same business."

    "You went to
see
Grens the next day. You knew, Erik, but you said nothing."

    "In the same business. The criminals. The people investigating the crime. And the informants make up the gray zone."

    He wasn't going to say anything.

    "And Sundkvist, this is the future. More informants. More covert human intelligence. It's a growth area. That's why I'm here."

    "If you had talked to us then, Erik, we wouldn't have been sitting opposite each other today. On either side of a dead man."

    "And that is why my European colleagues are here. We're here to learn. As it will continue to expand."

    They had worked on the same corridor for so damn long.

    Wilson had never before seen Sven Sundkvist lose control.

    "I want you to listen bloody closely now, Erik!"

    Sven grabbed the laptop, a plate on the white marble floor, a glass on the white tablecloth.

    "I can fast forward or rewind to wherever you want. Here? See that? The exact moment that the bullet penetrates the reinforced glass."

A mouth shouting in a monitor.

    "Or here? The exact moment the workshop explodes."

A face in profile in a window.

    "Or here, maybe? I haven't shown you this one yet. The remnants. The flags on the wall. All that remains."

A person stopped breathing,

    "You're responding the way you're supposed to respond, the way you've always responded: You protect your informant. But for Christ's sake, Erik, he's dead! There's nothing to protect anymore! Because you and your colleagues failed to do exactly that. That's why he's standing there in the window. That's why he dies exactly… there."

    Erik Wilson reached out to the computer screen that was turned toward him, closed it with a snap, and pulled out the plug.

"I
have worked as a handler as long as you have sat a few doors down.
I
have been responsible for informants all my working life.
I
have never not succeeded."

    Sven Sundkvist opened the laptop and turned it back again.

    "You can keep the cord. The battery's got plenty of juice."

    He pointed to the screen.

    "I don't understand, Erik. You've worked together for nine years. But when I show you that picture there… the exact moment he… there, do you see, exactly
there
he dies… you don't react."

    Erik Wilson snorted.

    "He wasn't my friend."

You trusted me.

    "But I was his friend."

I trusted you.

    "That's the way it works, Sundkvist. A handler pretends to be the informant's best friend. A handler has to play the role of the informant's best friend so goddamn well that the informant is willing to risk his life every day to get more information for his handler."

I miss you.

    "So the guy you saw on the screen? You were right. I didn't react." Erik Wilson dropped his linen napkin on the table.

    "Are you paying, Sundkvist?"

    He started to leave. The tasteful restaurant around him, the lady on her own at the table to the left with a glass of red wine, two men to the right at a table full of papers and dessert plates.

    "Västmannagatan 79."

    Sven Sundkvist caught up with him, beside him.

    "You knew everything, Erik. But you chose to say nothing. And contributed to the disappearance of someone associated with a murder. You manipulated police authority records and the national courts administration database. You placed-"

    "Are you threatening me?"

    Erik Wilson had stopped, red face, shoulders up.

    He was showing something that was more than just nothing. "Are you, Sundkvist? Threatening me?"

    "What do you think?"

    "What do I think? You've tried to convince me by showing me evidence and tried to get me to feel something by showing me pictures of death. And now you're trying to threaten me with some kind of goddamn investigation? Sundkvist, you've used all the chapters in the interview book. What do I think? You're insulting me."

    He continued on down the small step, past the table with four older men who were looking for their glasses and studying the menu and the empty serving carts and the two green climbers on a white wall.

    One last look.

    He stopped.

    "But… the truth is that I don't like people who burn my best informant when I'm not there."

    He looked at Sven Sundkvist.

    "So… yes, that recording. The meeting you're talking about. It did happen. What you heard is genuine. Every single word."

     Ewert Grens should perhaps have laughed. At least felt whatever it was that sometimes bubbles up in your belly, a delight that can't be heard.

    The recording was genuine.

    The meeting had taken place.

    Sven had called from a restaurant in the center of Jacksonville as he watched Wilson walk to his car and start the journey back to south Georgia, after he had confirmed it all.

    Grens didn't laugh. He had emptied himself that morning in a cage on a roof. He had screamed until the rage was released and let him sleep on a sofa. So now there was a space to be filled.

    But not with more anger, that was no longer enough.

    Not with satisfaction, even though he knew he was so close.

    But hate.

    Hoffmann had been burned. But survived. And taken hostages in order to continue surviving.

I carried out a legitimate murder.

    Ewert Grens phoned a person he loathed for the second time. "I need your help again."

    "Okay.”

    "Can you come to my apartment tonight?"

    "Your flat?"

    "Corner of Odengatan and Sveavägen."

    "Why?"

    "As I said. I need your help."

    Lars Ågestam scoffed.

    "You want me to meet you? After work? Why should I want to do that?

    After all… I'm not… now how did you put it… your
buddy."

    The secret intelligence report that was also on the laptop, but so fresh that it was in another file.

    The one I didn't show you last night.

    The one that I'm going to show you because I have no intention of carrying someone else's guilt.

    "It's not social, it's work. Västmannagatan 79. The preliminary investigation you just scaled down."

    "You're welcome to come to the Regional Public Prosecution Office tomorrow during the day."

    "You can open it again. As I know what
actually
happened. But I need your help one more time, Ågestam. Tomorrow morning is too late. That is when the head of the Government Offices security realizes that something is missing and passes on that information. When the wrong people then have time to adapt their versions, manipulate the evidence, change reality yet again."

    Grens coughed extensively close to the mouthpiece, as if he was uncertain as to how to continue.

    "And I apologize. For that. I was perhaps… well, you know." "No, what?"

    "Damn it, Ågestam!"

    "What?"

    "I was perhaps… I may have been a bit… churlish, a bit… well, unnecessarily harsh."

     Lars Ågestam walked down the seven flights of stairs in the offices at Kungsbron. A pleasant evening, warm, he longed for heat, as he always did after eight months of bitter wind and unpredictable snow. He turned around, looked at the windows of the Regional Public Prosecution Office, all dark. Two late phone calls had been longer than he expected: one phone call home-he had explained that he had to stay late and several times promised that he would wash the glasses from last night which still smelled of alcohol before he went to bed-then one call with Sven Sundkvist. He had gotten hold of him somewhere that sounded like an airport. He had wanted more information about the part of the investigation that involved Poland and their trip there to a now defunct amphetamine factory.