Three Seconds Read online

  Three Seconds

  Anders Roslund

  Börge Hellström

  Dark, suspenseful, and more riveting than any thriller at the local cineplex, THREE SECONDS is the latest novel from best-selling Swedish duo Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström-heirs apparent to Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell as the masters of Scandinavian crime.

  Piet Hoffman, a top secret operative for the Swedish police, is about to embark on his most dangerous assignment yet: after years spent infiltrating the Polish mafia, he's become a key player in their attempt to take over amphetamine distribution inside Sweden's prisons. To stop them from succeeding, he will have to go deep cover, posing as a prisoner inside the country's most notorious jail.

  But when a botched drug deal involving Hoffman results in a murder, the investigation is assigned to the brilliant but haunted Detective Inspector Ewert Grens-a man who never gives up until he's cracked the case. Grens's determination to find the killer not only threatens to expose Hoffman's true identity-it may reveal even bigger crimes involving the highest levels of power. And there are people who will do anything to stop him from discovering the truth.

  Winner of the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers' 2009 award for Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year, and a #1 best-seller there, THREE SECONDS captures a nefarious world of betrayal and violence, where a wise man trusts no one and even the most valuable agent can be 'burned.'

  Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström

  Three Seconds

  A book in the Ewert Grens series, 2010

  Translated from the Swedish by Kari Dickson, 2010

  Originally published in Sweden as Tre Sekunder;

  English translation published in Great Britain by Quercus, London, in 2010.

  Copyright © 2009 by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom

  For Vanja

  Who made our books better

  PART ONE

  Sunday

  An hour to midnight.

  It was late spring, but darker than he thought it would be. Probably because of the water down below, almost black, a membrane covering what seemed to be bottomless.

  He didn't like boats, or perhaps it was the sea he couldn't fathom. He always shivered when the wind blew as it did now and Świnoujcie slowly disappeared. He would stand with his hands gripped tightly round the handrail until the houses were no longer houses, just small squares that disintegrated into the darkness that grew around him.

  He was twenty-nine years old and frightened.

  He heard people moving around behind him, on their way somewhere, too; just one night and a few hours' sleep, then they would wake in another country.

  He leaned forward and closed his eyes. Each journey seemed to be worse than the last, his mind and heart as aware of the risk as his body; shaking hands, sweating brow, and burning cheeks, despite the fact that he was actually freezing in the cutting, bitter wind. Two days. In two days he'd be standing here again, on his way back, and he would already have forgotten that he'd sworn never to do it again.

  He let go of the railing and opened the door that swapped the cold for warmth and led onto one of the main staircases where unknown faces moved toward their cabins.

  He didn't want to sleep, he couldn't sleep-not yet.

  There wasn't much of a bar. M/S Wawel was one of the biggest ferries between northern Poland and southern Sweden, but all the same; tables with crumbs on them, and chairs with such flimsy backs that it was obvious you weren't supposed to sit there for long.

  He was still sweating. Staring straight ahead, his hands chased the sandwich around the plate and lunged for the glass of beer, trying not to let his fear show. A couple of swigs of beer, some cheese-he still felt sick and hoped that the new tastes would overwhelm the others: the big, fatty piece of pork he'd been forced to eat until his stomach was soft and ready, then the yellow stuff concealed in brown rubber. They counted each time he swallowed, two hundred times, until the rubber balls had shredded his throat.

  "Czy poda panu cos jeszcze?"

  The young waitress looked at him. He shook his head, not tonight, nothing more.

  His burning cheeks were now numb. He looked at the pale face in the mirror beside the till as he nudged the untouched sandwich and full glass of beer as far down the bar as he could. He pointed at them until the waitress understood and moved them to the dirty dishes shelf.

  "Postawk ci piwo?" A man his own age, slightly drunk, the kind who just wants to talk to someone, doesn't matter who, to avoid being alone. He kept staring straight ahead at the white face in the mirror, didn't even turn around. It was hard to know for sure who was asking and why. Someone sitting nearby pretending to be drunk, who offered him a drink, might also be someone who knew the reason for his journey. He put twenty euros down on the silver plate with the bill and left the deserted room with its empty tables and meaningless music.

  He wanted to scream with thirst and his tongue searched for some saliva to ease the dryness. He didn't dare drink anything, too frightened of being sick, of not being able to keep down everything that he'd swallowed.

  He had to do it, keep it all down, or else-he knew the way things worked-he was a dead man.

  He listened to the birds, as he often did in the late afternoon when the warm air that came from somewhere in the Atlantic retreated reluctantly in advance of another cool spring evening. It was the time of day he liked best, when he had finished what he had to do and was anything but tired and so had a good few hours before he would have to lie down on the narrow hotel bed and try to sleep in the room that was still only filled with loneliness.

  Erik Wilson felt the chill brush his face, and for a brief moment closed his eyes against the strong floodlights that drenched everything in a glare that was too white. He tilted his head back and peered warily up at the great knots of sharp barbed wire that made the high fence even higher, and had to fight the bizarre feeling that they were toppling toward him.

  From a few hundred meters away, the sound of a group of people moving across the vast floodlit area of hard asphalt.

  A line of men dressed in black, six across, with a seventh behind. An equally black vehicle shadowed them.

  Wilson followed each step with interest.

  Transport of a protected object. Transport across an open space.

  Suddenly another sound cut through. Gunfire. Someone firing rapid single shots at the people on foot. Erik Wilson stood completely still and watched as the two people in black closest to the protected person threw themselves over said person and pushed them to the ground, and the four others turned toward the line of fire.

  They did the same as Wilson, identified the weapon by sound. A Kalashnikov.

  From an alleyway between two low buildings about forty, maybe fifty meters away.

  The birds that had been singing a moment ago were silent; even the warm wind that would soon become cool, was still.

  Erik Wilson could see every movement through the fence, hear every arrested silence. The men in black returned the fire and the vehicle accelerated sharply, then stopped right by the protected person in the line of fire that continued at regular intervals from the low buildings. A couple of seconds later, no more, the protected body had been bundled into the back seat of the vehicle through an open door and disappeared into the dark.

  "Good."

  The voice came from above.

  "That's us done for this evening."

  The loudspeakers were positioned just below the huge floodlights. The president had survived this evening, once again. Wilson stretched, listened. The birds had returned. A strange place. It was the third time he had visited the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, or the FLETC, as it was called. It was as far south in the state of
Georgia as it was possible to go; a military base owned by the American state, a training ground for American police organizations-the DEA, ATF, U.S. Marshals, Border Patrol, and the people who had just saved the nation once more: the Secret Service. He was sure of it as he studied the floodlit asphalt: it was their vehicle, their people and they often practiced here at this time of day.

  He carried on walking along the fence, which was the boundary to another reality. It was easy to breathe-he'd always liked the weather here, so much lighter, so much warmer than the run-up to a Stockholm summer, which never came.

  It looked like any other hotel. He walked through the lobby toward the expensive, tired restaurant, but then changed his mind and carried on over to the elevators. He made his way up to the eleventh floor which for some days or weeks or months was the shared home of all course participants.

  His room was too warm and stuffy. He opened the window that looked out over the vast practice ground, peered into the blinding light for a while, then turned on the TV and flicked through the channels that were all showing the same program. It would stay on until he went to bed, the only thing that made a hotel room feel alive.

  He was restless.

  The tension in his body spread from his stomach to his legs to his feet, forcing him up off the bed. He stretched and walked over to the desk and the five mobile phones that lay there neatly in a row on the shiny surface, only centimeters apart. Five identical handsets between the lamp with the slightly overlarge lampshade and the dark leather blotting pad.

  He lifted them up one by one and read the display screen. The first four: no calls, no messages.

  The fifth-he saw it before he even picked it up.

  Eight missed calls.

  All from the same number.

  That was how he'd set it up. Only calls from one number to this phone. And only calls to one number from this phone.

  Two unregistered, pay-as-you-go cards that only phoned each other, should anyone decide to investigate, should anyone find their phones. No names, just two phones that received and made calls to and from two unknown users, somewhere, who couldn't be traced.

  He looked at the other four that were still on the desk. All with the same setup: they all were used to call one unknown number and they were all called from one unknown number.

  Eight missed calls.

  Erik Wilson gripped the phone that was Paula's.

  He calculated in his head. It was past midnight in Sweden. He rang the number.

  Paula's voice.

  "We have to meet. At number five. In exactly one hour."

  Number five.

  Vulcanusgatan 15 and Sankt Eriksplan 17.

  "We can't."

  "We have to."

  "Can't do it. I'm abroad."

  Deep breath. Very close. And yet hundreds of miles away.

  "Then we've got a bastard of a problem, Erik. We've got a major delivery coming in twelve hours."

  "Abort."

  "Too late. Fifteen Polish mules on their way in."

  Erik Wilson sat down on the edge of the bed, in the same place as before, where the bedspread was crumpled.

  A major deal.

  Paula had penetrated deep into the organization, deeper than he'd ever heard of before.

  "Get out. Now."

  "You know its not that easy. You know that I've got to do it. Or I'll get two bullets to the head."

  "I repeat, get out. You won't get any backup from me. Listen to me, get out, for Christ's sake!"

  The silence when someone hangs up mid-conversation is always deeply unnerving. Wilson had never liked that electronic void. Someone else deciding that the call was over.

  He went over to the window again, searching in the bright light that seemed to make the practice ground shrink, nearly drown in white.

  The voice had been strained, almost frightened.

  Erik Wilson still had the mobile phone in his hand. He looked at it, at the silence.

  Paula was going to go it alone.

  Monday

  He had stopped the car halfway across the bridge to Lidingö.

  The sun had finally broken through the blackness a few minutes after three, pushing and bullying and chasing off the dark, which wouldn't dare return now until late in the evening. Ewert Grens rolled down the window and looked out at the water, breathing in the chill air as the sun rose into dawn and the cursed night retreated and left him in peace.

  He drove on to the other side and across the sleeping island to a house that was idyllically perched on a cliff with a view of the boats that passed by below. He stopped in the empty parking lot, removed his radio from the charger, and attached a microphone to his lapel. He had always left it in the car when he came to visit her-no call was more important than their time together-but now, there was no conversation ro interrupt.

  Ewert Grens had driven to the nursing home once a week for twenty-nine years and had not stopped since, even though someone else lived in her room now. He walked over to what had once been her window, where she used to sit watching the world outside, and where he sat beside her, trying to understand what she was looking for.

  The only person he had ever trusted.

  He missed her so much. The damned emptiness clung to him, he ran through the night and it gave chase, he couldn't get rid of it, he screamed at it, but it just carried on and on… he breathed it in, he had no idea how to fill such emptiness.

  "Superintendent Grens."

  Her voice came from the glass door that normally stood open when the weather was fine and all the wheelchairs were in place around the table on the terrace. Susann, the medical student who was now, according to the name badge on her white coat, already a junior doctor. She had once accompanied him and Anni on the boat trip around the archipelago and had warned him against hoping too much.

  "Hello."

  "You here again."

  "Yes."

  He hadn't seen her for a long time, since Anni was alive.

  "Why do you do it?"

  He glanced up at the empty window.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Why do you do this to yourself?"

  The room was dark. Whoever lived there now was still asleep. "I don't understand."

  "I've seen you OUT here twelve Tuesdays in a row now."

  "Is there a law against it?"

  "Same day, same time as before."

  Ewert Grens didn't answer.

  "When she was alive."

  Susann took a step down.

  "You're not doing yourself any favors."

  Her voice got louder.

  "Living with grief is one thing. But you can't regulate it. You're not living with grief, you're living for it. You're holding on to it, hiding behind it. Don't you understand, Superintendent Grens? What you're frightened of has already happened."

  He looked at the dark window, the sun reflecting an older man who didn't know what to say.

  "You have to let go. You have to move on. Without the routine." "I miss her so much."

  Susann went back up the steps, grabbed the handle of the terrace door and was about to shut it when she stopped halfway, and shouted: "I never want to see you here again."

  It was a beautiful flat on the fourth floor of vastmannagatan 79. Three spacious rooms in an old building, high-ceilinged, polished wooden floors, and full of light, with windows that faced out over Vanadisvagen as well.

  Piet Hoffmann was in the kitchen. He opened the fridge and took out yet another carton of milk.

  He looked at the man crouching on the floor with his face over a red plastic bowl. Some little shit from Warsaw: petty thief, junkie, spots, bad teeth, clothes he'd been wearing for too long. He kicked him in the side with the hard toe of his shoe and the evil-smelling prick toppled over and finally threw up. White milk and small bits of brown rubber on his trousers and the shiny kitchen floor, some kind of marble.

  He had to drink more. Napij sir kurwa. And he had to throw up more.

  Piet Hoffma
nn kicked him again, but not so hard this time. The brown rubber around each capsule was to protect his stomach from the ten grams of amphetamine and he didn't want to risk even a single gram ending up somewhere it shouldn't. The fetid man at his feet was one of fifteen prepped mules who in the course of the night and morning had carried in two thousand grams each from winoujcie, onboard M/S Wawel, then by train from Ystad, without knowing about the fourteen others who had also entered the country and were now being emptied at various places in Stockholm,

  For a long time he had tried to talk calmly-he preferred it-but now he screamed pij do cholery as he kicked the little shit, he had to damn well drink more from the bloody milk carton and he was going to fucking pij do cholery throw up enough capsules for the buyer to check and quality-assure the product.

  The thin man was crying.

  He had bits of puke on his trousers and shirt and his spotty face was as white as the floor he was lying on.

  Piet Hoffmann didn't kick him anymore. He had counted the dark objects swimming around in the milk and he didn't need anymore for the moment. He fished up the brown rubber: twenty almost-round balls. He pulled on some kitchen gloves and rinsed them under the tap, then picked off the rubber until he had twenty small capsules which he put on a porcelain plate that he had taken from the kitchen cupboard.

  "There's more milk And there's more pizza. You stay here. Eat, drink and throw up. We want the rest."

  The sitting room was warm, stuffy. The three men at the rectangular dark oak table were all sweating-too many clothes and too much adrenaline. He opened the door to the balcony and stood there for a moment while a cool breeze swept out all the bad air.

  Piet Hoffmann spoke in Polish. The two men who had to understand what he was saying preferred it.

  "He's still got eighteen hundred grams to go. Take care of it. And pay him when he's done. Four percent."