Three Minutes Read online

  Identity verification. Passing through a metal detector. Visitors’ area. And then on to the information desk located in the large entrance hall.

  “My name is Erik Wilson, and I wish to speak to Sue Masterson.”

  The friendly, smiling receptionist turned to her computer screen.

  “Wilson, you said?”

  “Erik Wilson.”

  “I don’t see any appointments here.”

  “I’d like to see her anyway.”

  “I’m sorry, but it doesn’t really work like that. I’m going to have to ask you to make a formal appointment with the DEA chief, just like everyone else.”

  “I don’t have time. However, I do have information that Masterson wants. And if she doesn’t want it, I’m pretty sure she’ll want to make that decision for herself.”

  The receptionist smiled genially. But she’d started to glance toward the uniformed guards who formed a human avenue near the metal detector.

  “Sir, I’ll have to kindly ask you to leave—”

  “She’s going to want to meet me. If you call her and let her know Erik Wilson is looking for her. She’ll probably rush right down those stairs.”

  “You think so?”

  “I think so.”

  “Chief Masterson? I’m calling from the front desk. I sincerely apologize for interrupting you. But I have a person here with no appointment, who’s demanding to see you. He won’t take no for an answer—and I’ve now asked him to sit down and wait. His name is . . . one moment . . . Erik Wilson.”

  Sue Masterson rarely felt scared. As a child and as a teenager, yes, but she’d decided one day that enough was enough. Fear was a depressing and ugly companion, it limited life. And here, in this office, which despite several years as boss still seemed unnecessarily large and furnished with way too many expensive couches, she’d never felt anything even resembling fear. But now she felt it. This didn’t make sense. It couldn’t be true. Erik Wilson? They were never supposed to see each other again. She’d explained that! Erik had understood that! He must be aware that he was putting her in grave danger just by coming here, putting a loaded gun to her temple.

  She opened up the building’s surveillance cameras on her computer. There. A camera located above the front desk. Facing three simple chairs that made up a kind of provisional waiting room.

  A single person. Someone she had never seen before. In his sixties, wearing a suit, a bulky man. And she understood even less. Only three people knew of her relationship with Erik Wilson. Her. Erik. And Piet Hoffmann. No one else. But now there seemed to be four.

  Her immediate reaction, when fear has been replaced by anger, was to ask the guards to throw the bastard out. Until she realized that was no good. This might be Erik’s way of making contact.

  She read the display and camera. An older man. He didn’t look particularly likable. But not very dangerous either. Who the hell are you?

  “Okay.” She had put the handset down, pressed the microphone against the desk. Now she picked it up again. “I’m coming down. Tell the guards to keep him under surveillance.”

  In an oblong cabinet in one corner of the room a rarely used uniform hung near a shoulder holster. A Colt .45, her personal weapon, she preferred it to the standard service weapon. She put it on under her jacket and took the elevator down to the main floor.

  Ewert Grens didn’t like these chairs. They weren’t really meant for sitting. At least not for long. Hard sticks poked into the soft tissue of his back, and the angle of the seat pushed up on his spinal column.

  He was just about to get up and stretch when she came walking toward him through the large entrance hall. A beautiful woman, dignified, eyes that shone with power, integrity, wit. She reminded him of another police officer who used to sit in his corridor—that’s how Mariana Hermansson would have looked if she’d been the chief officer of an American police organization.

  “Erik Wilson?”

  He stood up, held out a hand, which she didn’t take. “Thank you for—”

  “You’re not Erik Wilson.”

  “No, we both know I’m not.” Grens leaned forward, lowered his voice. “And we both know who El Sueco is—and what kind of situation he’s in.”

  They looked at each other. She revealed absolutely nothing. The whole world had learned of the code name El Sueco in the past few days, and an unannounced visitor turning up spouting that name didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  Grens had expected that, would have reacted the same way, and when he continued, it was even more quietly, almost a whisper. “However, in Sweden, at the City Police’s Investigation Unit where Erik Wilson is my boss, we called him Paula.”

  No reaction. She not only looked competent, she was.

  “You want more? Details that only someone here on behalf of Erik would know?”

  She didn’t answer, but saw through him in a way he’d rather avoid.

  “His real name is Piet Hoffmann.”

  No answer.

  “And he’s generally considered dead.”

  No answer.

  “So today he calls himself Haraldsson.”

  No change in expression. Grens was starting to like this woman quite a bit.

  “Okay.” He smiled. “Erik explained in writing how this would work. That if I ever needed to contact you, if I ever ended up standing opposite you in this very building, that you’d treat me exactly as you’re treating me now. So he gave me a last resort. You know, the very last. I’m using it now.”

  Sue Masterson shifted her position. And the words Atlanta, June 9, 2006, ran through her head.

  “He told me to say, and I quote now, Atlanta, June 9, 2006.”

  She looked at him the same way as before, neutral. Or rather, she tried to look at him that way. But didn’t succeed completely. There was a flash in her eyes, quick, but anything but neutral.

  Then she smiled, weakly. “I’d like to add that we were only engaged for a very short time.” And whispered. “Saxby’s Coffee, six o’clock. On Thirty-Fifth Street in Georgetown. Three blocks from the Potomac. I want a coffee, black, and a jelly doughnut.”

  She began walking toward the elevator, but turned around, speaking more loudly now. “I apologize in advance for this.” Then she stretched one hand in the air, waved to some uniformed guards, four in total. “Please see this man out.”

  Grens had no time to react. They ran over to him, grabbed him, two held him tightly by his arms, while a third marched in front of him and a fourth marched behind. They pushed and pulled the visitor through the front door and down the stairs. One of them told him to go to hell, and another said that if he ever showed his face here again he’d be arrested, locked up, and tried in court.

  A crowded, intimate café with a long bar the same color as freshly ground coffee, which forced patrons to sit so close together they could no longer see each other. The sort of place he himself would have chosen, easy to control, monitor. While he’d been waiting, he’d strolled through the beautiful neighborhood DC called Georgetown, and he felt like it was one of the few places that could compete with Svea Road in Stockholm. There was a picturesque peacefulness here that he ought to dislike, but actually enjoyed. Saxby’s Coffee lay on the corner of O and Thirty-Fifth Street, and he considered, when they were done here, stepping out of the café and entering the building next door, going up the stairs and knocking on the first door to ask if they had a room for rent indefinitely. Bogotá yesterday, Washington today, and that same feeling—Grens, locked into his patterns and routines, suddenly needed to fly, taste, smell, see more of the world, before life had passed him by. Later, maybe when he was done with another life, Hoffmann’s.

  He checked the clock on the wall. Thirty-three minutes after the hour. She was late. Or, he realized, she was acting like a professional. Masterson was sitting somewhere making sure he was alone, that he could handle waiting without getting too stressed, as someone with a hidden agenda might. Then she came through the door. She’d made her asse
ssment, and now she walked over to his table, toward a cup of coffee and a jelly doughnut.

  “Your coffee got a little cold. Where were you sitting? When you were studying me, I mean? Did you discover anything abnormal?”

  She nodded to the building across the street, which was as beautiful as the one they were sitting in now, wood with green shutters against white panels. “If I had, you would have already been arrested.”

  “The coffee’s cold, but the doughnut you wanted is fine. My treat. Maybe I can avoid getting thrown out this time?”

  She smiled, then turned serious. “We have to keep this short. A federal prosecutor would consider my participation in this conversation treasonous. Before we continue, I’d like a name.”

  “A name?”

  “Your name.”

  The older man leaned forward. “Ewert Grens, detective superintendent. The rest of what I said at our last meeting was true—I work in the homicide unit in Stockholm, for the City Police, and Erik Wilson is my boss.”

  “Grens?”

  “Yes.”

  “You gave the command to shoot Hoffmann? You are the police officer that both Erik and Hoffmann told me about?”

  “Yes.”

  Sue Masterson examined him, seemed to look through him.

  “Well, then, I understand better why a man of your age would head to Colombia and then here to act on behalf of Hoffmann. Ewert Grens. You’re driven by the same engine as me.”

  I’m sitting here because it’s my goddamn fault that Piet Hoffmann was forced to flee. You’re sitting here because it’s your damn fault that he’s been forced to flee again. We’re both here because guilt is a very powerful force.

  At the airport in Bogotá, he’d bought a basic laptop that he kept in an equally basic shoulder bag. Now, he placed it on the table between them.

  “The kill list. The one you couldn’t get his name off of. Hoffmann has his own solution.”

  A flash drive in hand, which had been kept in the same envelope as the tickets to Washington. Grens poked it into the computer, opened the video file recorded by Hoffmann’s satellite. The location coordinates had been edited away.

  Masterson did exactly as Grens had one day earlier—stared at the image without being able to interpret it. “And this is . . . ?”

  “A cage. You’re looking at the top of it. And inside that cage sits the world’s most wanted man.”

  Her eyes didn’t leave the screen. “I don’t understand.”

  “Hoffmann’s private satellite. Don’t ask me how. But he’s monitoring the cage via computer.”

  Masterson stared deep into the picture, slowly beginning to make sense of it, looked neither at Grens nor anyone else in the site she’d so carefully secured.

  “So that’s Crouse?”

  “According to Hoffmann. If you trust him.”

  She sat in silence. For a long time.

  “Our mutual friend’ solution, to get himself off that kill list. involves freeing the man inside that cage.”

  And she swallowed her forgotten doughnut in two bites while nodding, which meant he should proceed.

  “Windows of time. Those gaps where the satellites can’t cover every moment. Holes. Hoffmann wants to know when they occur and where. I’m going to be giving you some coordinates. And he wants to know without having to say why.”

  She looked at him in surprise. He understood what she was thinking.

  “No, chief—not those coordinates. Not the cage—that’s his life insurance, and he’s not giving those up. This applies to another place. A spot in the Caribbean.”

  Grens handed her a handwritten note with the long rows of numbers. She looked at it without taking in what it really was; for the moment it was meaningless. However, what did matter was someone sitting in front of her claiming he was acting on behalf of a man who’d located the site of Crouse’s captivity. Everything inside her was screaming—she should call for backup, take him in, here and now. But she didn’t. It wouldn’t help—he didn’t know where the cage was. No matter how hard they squeezed Grens during interrogation, it wouldn’t matter. The death sentence was her fault. But—if the line she was balancing on held, carried her all the way, she’d be able to discharge her debt, make sure the informant went free—the only person outside of the PRC guerrillas with any knowledge of where the Speaker of the House was right now.

  “I have contacts at the NGA—the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. We cooperate on several projects. I can get an appointment for you with a person who’ll give you what you want—the timetable for these satellite orbits. And who will understand that this meeting never took place. You, in turn, will have to prepare yourself for another cup of coffee here in exactly . . .” She looked at the clock ticking on the wall. “. . . three hours and seventeen minutes. Then you’ll have a half hour—they don’t close until ten.”

  She touched the piece of paper with the list of numbers on it. Now I’m committing treason. In their eyes. Now I’m stepping over the line. But surely helping two of your own can never be considered betraying your country? Giving them the chance to survive? And if she didn’t do this? It would mean ensuring that Hoffmann—the only man who knew where Crouse was besides his kidnappers—took that knowledge with him to his grave.

  “Detective Grens—are we done?”

  “We’re done as far as these timelines. He can figure out the holes himself from that, apparently.”

  Masterson had, without being aware of it, folded the handwritten note into smaller and smaller squares until it was impossible to fold anymore. Now she unfolded it again, handed it back. “Exactly what is he going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She looked at him—he really didn’t know. He too had chosen to trust Hoffmann.

  “However, I know that he has another requirement.”

  “Another one?”

  “He wants you, and only you, to vouch for eight battle-hardened and incorruptible men, one of whom should be a helicopter pilot with access to a vehicle. And in seventy-two hours he wants them in a town called Calamar, in a small church close to something called the Registraduría Municipal del Estado Civil. Fully equipped for movement over water as well as in the jungle, for night combat, for a raid. And he wants to be in command of them for the entire length of the operation, twelve hours.”

  Masterson had so far let her cold coffee stand. Now she drank, mostly to give herself something to do while she considered what the older man, who’d managed to win the trust of both Erik and Hoffmann, had just requested and for what purpose. And if she, the DEA chief, could handle it.

  Eight incorruptibles in a country where corruption ruled. There was only one option. The Crouse Force. Soldiers trained by the DEA in the United States, their salaries paid by the DEA.

  “And after that, Detective Grens? After I’ve contacted the head of the Crouse Force and asked him to assist a faceless, nameless undercover agent and regain the reputation he lost during the hostage attack? What else will the man you represent want?”

  “A simple fishing boat. Moored at a pier just south of Caño de Loro on an island called Isla Tierra Bomba. And under a tarp on that fishing boat, four 12-gauge shotgun shells, loaded with the thinnest carbon fibers cut in ten two-meter-long pieces. And a waterproof MP3 player with a recording of a Russian submarine blowing air underwater and then after one minute of silence opening its torpedo hatches. And a small container with Cesium-137. After that, he’s satisfied.”

  She observed him. They observed each other. Cesium-137—a radioactive substance. They both knew that—the meeting was over. Because if she didn’t ask, she wouldn’t receive any answer that forced her to say no.

  They stood up simultaneously, while Grens searched his inside jacket pocket, for another small piece of paper with numbers on it. “My unregistered phone number. If you need to reach me. We have . . . shared interests.”

  She took it, then grabbed a pen from her bag and napkin from the table next to them, w
rote down her own number, and handed it to Grens. She smiled. “Bowling, right?”

  “What?”

  “Bowling. Our shared interest.”

  Ewert Grens smiled too. “Just what I was thinking.”

  Same table. The same kind of coffee and doughnut, he thought he’d try one for himself now.

  Grens had spent three hours wandering around a neighborhood he wouldn’t mind living in, admiring Georgetown’s lovely houses, drinking lemon-flavored mineral water in some hole in the wall, attempting an American accent—which he’d never dared before—with passersby and waiters and whoever happened to be standing next to him at the bar.

  When he returned to the café for a second time this evening, the owner nodded in recognition and started to grind up some Colombian coffee beans before Grens even had time to order.

  At exactly 9:30 p.m. a young man walked in. Khaki shorts and a white shirt, dark hair that was pasted with sweat to his forehead. He didn’t check his surroundings, didn’t search, he knew where he was going. Determined steps toward the table where an older, Swedish detective was drinking his evening coffee.

  “You wanted to see me, sir.”

  “Sit down.”

  “I’d rather not be seen here with you, sir. I only came here to give you this.”

  Another flash drive on the table. Grens was getting used to it.

  “If you don’t sit, our meeting is going to look exactly like you don’t want it to. I’ve ordered some damn good coffee. You don’t need to drink it if you don’t want to. But you need to sit here for fifteen minutes. Then you can go.”

  Sweat dripped from his forehead. His eyes. His way of moving. The young man was extremely scared.

  “And no need for the sirs. We need to be able to talk to each other. So this can seem normal.”